Saturday, March 24, 2012

Neptune in Pisces


Neptune, the planet of illusion, delusion and spirituality is now in Pisces—the sign of its rule, the absolute best place for it to function. Pisces, the most diffuse of all the water signs, seldom needs to define anything. It lets things be whatever they are with no judgments or need to harness them to its own aim. In Pisces is the ultimate receptivity; it’s wide open, willing to receive all sorts of stimulus, inspiration, and vague notions that are impossible to define concretely. In Pisces is the ability not only to intuit, but to empathize. It can feel simply by being in the presence of emotion not even its own. To witness pain is to feel that pain and thus is born the desire to remove the pain—to help, to heal, to act kindly.
Because Pisces sets so few limits, it’s a wonderful place for creativity because it’s wide open to new ideas. What if?  Why not. Pisces is all about feeling and not remotely about defining anything, so it can allow all sensation to wash over, and it will happily float along, ballast on a sea of impressions, visions, vague thoughts, and images.
Thus the way Neptune works in Pisces is to send out a vibration for limitless awareness, for sensation that supersedes knowledge, and for a greater willingness to harbor beauty, understanding, love, and peace. It helps us see life from the perspective of others and to say, well I wouldn’t like that so why should you have to endure it. That’s one of the reasons that slavery ends during Neptune in Pisces—people sense that it’s just wrong. We don’t think of slavery as a current situation, but across the globe there are enslaved peoples, women used in human trafficking, and so on, and during the current pass of Neptune in Pisces maybe these atrocities will be eradicated.
Religion is another issue that comes to the forefront during this transit. Did you watch The Tudors on Showtime?  Apart from showing Henry VIII’s penchant for romantic troubles, it chronicled the religious dramas of the day, the dawning of the Church of England, an outgrowth of Henry’s disgust with the Pope when a requested divorce was denied. The Order of Jesuits was established during Neptune in Pisces as well. Bibles were printed or translated. Religion is an interesting topic, although it’s often more about power than spirituality, which is why it holds little appeal for me. If you have to go to war over it, how can God be a part of it. Neptune would ask us just to let each other believe as we like, feeling there is room for all. But through history that’s not always the case. The Salem witchcraft trials occurred during this transit. Although we probably won’t be indulging in religious wars in this country, wars over belief, nationality, and ethnic origin still occur across the globe along with mass atrocities, so maybe there’s hope for some changes in that regard.
Water, mist, and chemicals relate to Neptune and there are many historical events that illustrate how Neptune in Pisces functions. My favorite is sort of funny—a guy crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope. But there are other, more significant manifestations. Dynamite was patented. The first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The first U.S. paper mill was established. Chloroform was first used for childbirth. The first America’s Cup was won by the schooner America. Gold was discovered in California and if that isn’t all about chasing a Neptunian dream I don’t know what is. In fact, in a previous life I was an old battleaxe (hold your tongues) and went to California to search for gold—where there was none—for decades. Something about learning patience they tell me!
In today’s paper there was an article about breakthroughs in the development of synthetic blood and although it sounds a little like the hit Vampire drama True Blood on HBO (a point that was made in the opening sentences of the article), that could be one manifestation of the current go-around. There is also much discussion about legalizing marijuana, and although voters here in California keep defeating it, who knows. It could be possible in coming years that better antidotes to drug addiction will be developed. Or insecticides. On the news and in the papers have been many reports about bed bugs and frankly this has me creeped out. Maybe something to eradicate them will be developed.
Also in the news was a report about the elderly needing whooping cough injections, and of course flu shots. I’ve never indulged in the latter, but I confess to thinking that childhood inoculations were enough to protect me from the former. When my daughter was a child she got the DPT shot, one shot to protect against diphtheria, pertussis (whooping couch) and tetanus. In fact, it’s currently a cause célèbre among parents about inoculating their children at all. Some theories postulate that the increase in autism is a result of childhood shots. It’s my understanding that these theories have been proven incorrect but that doesn’t mean that people know this.
We can assume that during this period there could be all sorts of scientific breakthroughs where drugs are concerned. In fact, it occurs to me that investing in pharmaceuticals isn’t such a bad idea, particularly with Jupiter also in Pisces during part of Neptune’s tenure there. Diabetes is a terrible disease and it seems particularly Neptunian to me as it relates to metabolism and sugars. I wonder if some breakthroughs will happen in this disease. We’re in what seems like a sugary period of time. We’re all too fat and chefs are celebrities as popular as movie stars. Food---it’s become too important. They do have drugs now that block fat and carbs, or so they tell us. I’ve been too chicken to try them. But if a scientist could create a safe, healthy drug that could regulate metabolism and hunger, that would be a good thing. You’d crave only the food your body needed and you’d burn up the calories, maintaining the perfect weight. Talk about a brave new world. I could swoon just thinking about that idea.
Oil is another issue. Scientists keep pointing out that the reserves of fossil fuel are dwindling so maybe they will come up with a better solution—although we probably can’t just drop a banana into the gas tank in our future cars as Michael J. Fox did in Back to the Future. There is much talk now about the damage done to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems from the oil dispersants used to quell the recent months-long oil spill. We should know better than to risk drilling in locations where spills can do so much damage. And we should also know that chemicals in the waterways are a bad idea. So it’s a two-pronged issue—how do we fuel motion without oil and how do we guard against damage to the earth as long as we continue to use oil. I suppose one way is for more people to telecommute. I always feel that computers are Uranus, but moving pictures are Neptune, so what is video chat?  It’s cool, that’s what it is!  If more people work from home then less oil is needed to get us all from point A to point B.
Light is relevant too, and the first practical reflecting telescope was among the achievements of Sir Isaac Newton during this transit. It was his theory that a prism can decompose white light into the many colors that form the visible spectrum.   Newton worked on many laws of science and nature during Neptune in Pisces and for three centuries his views dominated. He taught us about gravity—and that the same sets of natural  laws governing motion of objects on earth also applies to celestial bodies. The speed of light was measured now.
Although time is a function of Saturn, defeating time relates to Neptune and I wonder if we’ll ever be able to travel through time. I love that idea. Are you interested in solar energy?  I did my sixth grade science project on it and that was long before it was anything to anyone. Maybe there will be some progress in this field and there will be ways to use the energy we already have to power things, clean energy that could never harm anyone or anything. Maybe light can be fragmented to release energy the way the atom was split to release tremendous force. That’s the thing with Neptune, it grants us the spark of imagination to look at life from a new perspective and then to consider what we intuit as a potential future.
Water is the globe’s most basic substance and recently machines have been developed to add an additional molecule of oxygen to water, making it a cleaner stronger than even bleach. You can drink it, but if you spray a counter with it, all the germs will be gone. I hope more innovations along those lines come along and maybe a way to turn water into energy, which of course has been done with steam, but steam also requires fire, which isn’t that clean.
Literature is very interesting during Neptune in Pisces—Moby Dick, a whale of a tale, came out but wasn’t that well received. Neptune in Pisces can be very fanciful and can be what scientists call anthropomorphic—seeing human personality characteristics in other creatures or even inanimate objects. The beloved Mother Goose Tales was released during this transit. Tortured stories of love and mystery seem very Neptunian and the Bronte sisters wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre during this transit.
Some of literature in the past during Neptune in Pisces crossed the border between fiction and philosophy. There were points to be made. The Scarlett Letter was released then, and amusingly a play on that theme was used in a movie I recently saw, Easy-A, which was created before the transit, but in a way relates to it. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beacher Stowe’s tale of slavery, became a lightning rod. Thoreau produced Walden and Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass. Madame Bovary, a tortured story of meaningless life made more special by a search for illicit pleasures is a war of gratification versus consequences—Neptune versus Saturn you could say.
Neptune is art, whether the paint or the painting and the first avant-garde movement in art, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, began during this period. The other day I saw some 3-D televisions for sale and thought how totally Neptune in Pisces they are. I like meatballs flying at me as much as the next gal, but do I really want to sit at home in those goofy glasses watching 3-D?  I don’t but maybe you do. And maybe in the coming decade cool movies will be made that we all will want to don glasses to enjoy.
Music is very strongly Neptunian as well, and some of the greatest musicians were born during this transit—Bach, Handel, Scarlatti and even John Phillip Sousa. The great philosophers Aristotle and Voltaire were born as well as artists Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat. Eternal youth and author of Peter Pan, James Barrie was born now as well as satirist Guy De Maupassant—remember the tale of the borrowed jewels which when lost ruined the life of the borrower who worked for decades to repay their cost only to learn they were paste and worthless?  Witty playwright George Bernard Shaw and adventuresome Robert Louis Stevenson were born now as well, and so was the infamous Lizzy Borden who allegedly gave her parents those forty whacks.
I wonder if there will be art geared toward healing with Neptune in Pisces. Maybe music can be written to help a person space out and find a centered place, akin to powerful meditation, and that can promote healing. Cast your mind free for a moment and see what you can envision as a result of this transit. I wonder if more sunken treasures will be discovered in their watery tombs. People always say Atlantis will rise and be a continent once more. Maybe it will. Maybe eye doctors will come up with additional surgeries to heal eyesight—or maybe they already have it, I’m not sure. Maybe there will be better lasers to remove tumors more quickly, better imaging devices to detect illness almost before it starts.
If we develop better telescopes, maybe we will find other civilizations in distant stars. There can be so many new things with this transit that comes only once every one and a half centuries. Maybe there will be ways to make art using light, windows that shade from within so you don’t need drapes (though they may already have something similar). There are so many potentials, and I bet you’ve thought of some I haven’t.
 Neptune in Pisces will affect us all, but it’s particularly intense for those of us with planets in the Mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces). Pisces planets will, of course, receive the conjunction and everything will be colored by an even stronger Neptunian flair. This could be a good thing for energy that is already rather vague but it might end up making you even less focused, which you might not want. Who knows though—with Pisces you might like it and not mind at all. Gemini and Sagittarius will receive a square and that brings doubt and confusion. It’s hard to know what you should do and the tendency is to second guess yourself. Virgo will receive the most difficult aspect—the opposition. You won’t know what to think because it will be hard to affirm that other people are regarding you with approval. All you can do is your best. Try to focus on life in a more peaceful way, don’t be combative and hope for the best. Get as much rest as possible and don’t put as many demands on yourself. This is the time for faith, hope, and charity, which when you think about it is a pretty nice way to live.


This post was excerpted from my article about Neptune in Pisces which appeared in Dell Horoscope Magazine.