Neptune In Pisces - Home I'll Be

“That which is imagined need never be lost.”—Clive Barker Neptune recently moved into its own sign of the zodiac, watery Pisces.  In its own sign, Neptune comes home and is in the sign most closely connected to its own nature.  What is that nature?

BOUNDLESS LONGING

Neptune is typically associated with dreams and illusions and mystical longing.  If the practical world is your home base and you strive to manage that world with ease, Neptune is challenging.  Neptune provides dissolving and softening, like a muscle relaxant to the worked-out rigidities of the practical world.  When it comes to the practical world, Neptune dutifully achieves its escapist reputation via fantasies, guilty pleasures, down-time, and countless other time-wasters that lure you away from “reality.”  If reality is about being grounded, getting work done and being responsible, Neptune is more about having a deep, relaxing massage that never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ends.

Neptune’s discovery in 1846 occurred during the Romantic period of western history.  The power of the imagination contained within the Romantic vision is also contained within Neptune’s boundless waters, oceans, fogs, mysteries and yearnings.  While Neptune’s longings may get in the way of fulfilling your real-world responsibilities, the great Romantics saw (and see) the world from a different perspective.  Says James Hillman:

“To be filled with longing—that is fulfillment. Tell me what you long for, said the German Romantics, and I will tell you who you are.”

Fundamentally, Neptune is a longing.  Longing for what, though?  William Wordsworth, one of the great Romantic poets, writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting.”  The Neptunian part of you is the soul, longing for its home—its real home, elsewhere—a home you can barely remember but can never forget, a home you can only glimpse through imagination.  While this longing for home feels intensely intimate and deeply personal, it’s a longing shared by every human, and from it emerges great art, great music, great movies, and great poetry.  Within the essence of our imagination and artistic expression resides the source of who we are, as individuals and as a collective.  The longing for that source is particularly strong when Neptune is in Pisces.

When Neptune was last in Pisces, the California Gold Rush brought countless people galloping over the rugged American terrain (imagine Neptune’s horses) longing for gold from the waters of California, establishing what has become the modern American Dream.  Not surprisingly, popular culture (a strong carrier of Neptune) is currently envisioning the American West again:  “Rango” features Johnny Depp as a heroic lizard cowboy who saves the water reserves of a dried-up town, and in the process meets the mystical Spirit of the West itself; the lead character in the television series "Justified" is a cowboy detective; British sci-fi show “Doctor Who” heads to America for the first time with the centuries-old time-traveling Doctor donning a Stetson; CW hit “Supernatural” brings the Winchester brothers into the Wild Wild West, cowboy hats and all; and this summer Harrison Ford stars in “Cowboys and Aliens.”

ORIGINS & MEMORIES

Water is the source of all life as we know it, according to science and according to most creation mythologies of cultures worldwide.  The emergence of great art from the imagination shows more of Neptune’s nature as a womb-like source of creation.

With these Neptunian connotations of the womb and birth, it’s not surprising that shortly before Neptune entered Pisces this year, Lady GaGa took the music world in her monster arms again and rocked it (to sleep?) with “Born This Way.”  For the song’s premiere live performance, she arrived at the Grammy Awards in an egg, having incubated in it for three days prior so she could emerge from it to perform the song.

Again:  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”

In addition to its connection to life, water is also associated with memory.  If Wordsworth is correct that when we are born we forget our true origins, Neptune’s longing reminds us with its subtle IV drip of memory that seeps into every moment of every life.  We have glimpses of the eternal self we dream of being “if only....”  It can be very difficult to hang on to that whiff of a memory, despite its enormous appeal, especially if it makes the world around us look all the more dreary, ordinary and dull.  This leads to one of the most challenging components of both Neptune and Pisces: addictions.

THE ADDICT ARCHETYPE

One of the dangers of Neptune in Pisces, particularly relevant in today’s culture, is addiction.  It’s hard to track cycles of addiction historically, because not only has addiction saturated our modern world, but the modern world—still rushing for gold—includes addiction to the modern world itself (shutting out the past, living “in the now”).

Neptune’s longing for home is also a longing for eternity, to be outside of the tight, restrictive bounds of time and space with its limits and walls and separation and aloneness.  These longings can be so powerful and overwhelming (oceanic) that we may try desperately grabbing on to something—anything!—in the world around us to make them go away.  We grab onto the illusion that eating enough chocolate bars or cookies will make them go away.  See, addictions aren’t just a desperate attempt to escape the dull, drab, ordinary world of limits, or to escape from the emotional wreckage of a troubled childhood.  That is one component.  Addictions are also—from the other direction—an attempt to shut out eternity, to occlude the memory of eternity we each carry.  This is why, in the throes of addiction, the one particular thing in the one particular moment of “now” becomes so vitally important.

See, with Neptune we always have a paradox, and with Pisces we always have two fish.  From whichever direction we approach addiction—as an escape from this world or as an escape from the memory of eternity—the question still remains of how to deal with the paradox of addiction.  Apparently, eating the chocolate bars, drinking the alcohol, smoking the joint, spending the money, or working overtime-and-then-some, never really works.  Working never works, and escaping is no escape, so what’s left?

THE MYSTIC ARCHETYPE

If the Addict archetype is one of the two fish, the other is the Mystic archetype. They work together: little fish, big fish. The Addict is a Mystic, trapped in illusion.  Trying to escape from confining limits, the Addict only finds himself more confined (to twelve steps, one at a time, for example); running from eternity, he only finds himself closer to it (addiction takes its toll on the body)—no wonder Neptune has a reputation for confusion!

While the Addict is devoted to the ego, the Mystic is devoted to the soul. While the Addict shuts out memories of eternity and of the past to live in an isolated moment of “now,” the Mystic embraces it all, now, and celebrates with an exuberant dance of life. Neptune’s longing for the soul—a bane for the Addict of earth—is the Mystic’s key to unlocking the paradise of life on earth.  Where the Addict sacrifices life for the sake of the addiction, the Mystic makes all of life sacred (the true meaning of “sacrifice”).

When the ordinary world is too dull and uninteresting—or way too distressed—think like a Mystic. Through the eyes of the Mystic, what is “ordinary” (regular) becomes “ordained” (holy)—the two words have the same etymological roots. This transformation from something plain to something sacred is what Neptune is all about. Everything seems to stay the same, yet everything has changed. It’s what happens when reading a poem, and why so much of poetry consists of seemingly “normal” images which somehow become magical through the vehicle of poetry. When we operate from the imagination, the whole world becomes sacred. Rather than trying to feed the insatiable ego, we can satisfy the soul.

When Clive Barker wrote in his book Weaveworld, “That which is imagined need never be lost,” he hit on the Neptunian connection between memory and imagination, and how the imagination can return soul (eternity) to the world around us.  The world needs our imagining, not our escape into literalism.  The world needs our participation, because how we image things makes all the difference in the world, in what we create and how we create.  While Neptune is in Pisces, we have the opportunity to weave eternity into the world around us—our home away from Home—with threads of the imagination, one end tied to the true source of who we are and the other end open to sacred connection.  Eternity is real, it’s right in front of us, and it’s only a fantasy away.

Tangled

Part 2 of 3. Back in the 1960’s, western culture was enamored with hair.  There were plenty of beehives and bouffants, but to be more specific I’m referring to the musical “Hair”:

“Gimme a head with hair, long beautiful hair.”

From the same musical came the anthem “Aquarius” with its visionary imaginings of the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”  Hints of the dawning of a new age took hold.  It’s true—this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  We are living it.  But the dawning of one Age is also the twilight of another, just as sunrise in one part of our planet is sunset in another.  Now we are sitting, uneasily, in the twilight time between Ages, and it seems our long, beautiful hair has become... tangled.  Tangled in the twilight, tangled between the outgoing Age of Pisces and the incoming Age of Aquarius.

What does this mean?  What does the tangle look like?  To start, let’s look at the symbolism of Twilight itself.

Twilight is a fascinating time, when the sun dips just below the horizon.  The day’s light has just set, the evening’s darkness has begun to rise, and for a short while day and night live together in the same space.  (A charming depiction of this is the recent Pixar short “Day & Night”.)  No longer is it only day, not yet is it only night.  Most cultures view this time of day with trepidation, fear and uncertainty.  The light is disappearing, and who knows what the darkness holds?  Will the light ever return again?  The imagination can have a field day.  Mythology shows that Twilight is the dangerous time when Vampires emerge from their coffins and roam the world in search of pristine and pure Virgins (often with long, beautiful hair) on whom to feed.  The Virgin is the symbol of integrity.  Her purity intact, the “unmarried” Virgin has not yet become tangled in the world, has not yet been penetrated.  She is herself; she is one. 

“One” is actually the perfect entry point to look at the tangle of our times, between Pisces and Aquarius.  Part of the Virgin’s job is to allow things in, but to keep herself pure all the same.  This requires skills of discernment and differentiation, to let the "right" one in.  When Glinda descended in her bubble in Oz, the first thing she asked Dorothy was, “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?”  It’s good to know the difference between things right from the start.

Both Pisces and Aquarius connect to "unity" and “one”, although from opposite perspectives.  They both agree that “we are all one,” but Pisces compassionately asks, “Aren’t we all the same, really?” while Aquarius answers, as in the U2 song, “We’re one, but we’re not the same.”

Pisces asks, “Did you get a haircut?”  Aquarius answers, “Actually, I got them all cut.”  What Pisces sees and experiences in gestalt and mystery, Aquarius sees in HD—high definition—clarity.  1 hour versus 3,600 seconds.  Pisces’ lack of boundaries opens it up to the whole ocean, while Aquarius is every drop of rain of the rainy season over which is resides.

In the world we’ve seen how the massive Piscean energies that swallowed humanity in large gulps of Christianity over the last 2,000 years, and then digested them into different bits called Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, etc., is the same dynamic that took a once-unified group of people called “gays” and divided them up into gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers, and many, many more.  There’s a lot of in-fighting that leads to divisiveness, but division is not really the problem; it’s the solution.  “Divided” in the sense of “different”; differentiation (Aquarius) rather than diffusion (Pisces).  We are all united whether we are united in that or not.  It's time to split hairs.  Just as in the model of the United States,  where each individual state unites as one country, so too must we unite as different and unique individuals, each a unique part of the whole “one” of humanity.  This is why one of Aquarius’ key traits is the humanitarian.

So we’re back at one.  Not that we ever left it.  If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of talk about “the one” in these last couple of decades.  Mom and pop shops have been increasingly replaced with massive “one”-stops;  Neo in “The Matrix” had to accept that he was, in fact, “the one”; "Lord of the Rings" featured "the one" ring to rule them all; and all Elton John ever needed, as he sang, was “the one”.  While new agers joyfully squeal, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, California has frequent wonderings of when “the big one” will hit.  Dating websites inspire you to find “the one” who completes you, while a recent movie says to let “the right one” in.  And, of course, all along the Christian religion has its hopes pinned on the return of the One, the Savior, the original Redeemer who is famous for dying, for sacrificing his self, and whose followers have molded themselves into that same shape ever since.

See, ultimately with Pisces the self is sacrificed—martyred—for the good of the whole, or at the very least the self is watered down, particularly by the word “selfish” (i.e., "Don't be selfish!").  With Aquarius, the self is not sacrificed at all.  With Aquarius, the self is celebrated, although not with celebrity.  All selves are celebrated.  But currently we are still tangled up.  We see “flash mobs” of unified individual behavior generated consciously (Aquarius), but acted out with the anonymity of a school of fish (Pisces).  We see people celebrating diversity mostly with mirror-people who are just like them.  Mash-ups (as in “Glee”) may be more truly Aquarian in nature, as two individual songs with their own identities merge and somehow manage to keep their identity within the whole.  Unity without anonymity.

The trouble these days is that the sacrificed self is everywhere (not least as a terrorist), paired with its equally strong opposite:  the narcissist.  They appear together, the two identical fishes swimming in opposite directions, always connected.  How do we let the right one in?  Is there a right one?  How do we know?  The result is nothing short of a fish fry, with people flip-flopping toward burnout at increasingly rapid rates.  Self-sacrifice doesn’t seem to be the solution; neither does vain narcissism.  And so we see the Vampire archetype emerge in the Twilight time, with its sacrificial victims, and we see the anemic walking dead, the consummate victims of a profound energy crisis.

What to do?

Fortunately, the stars offer this opportunity for us to look at this issue with some clarity while the Sun is in Aquarius, as well as the recent pileup of planets in the sign.

Part 3 will look at the upcoming pileup of planets in the sign of Aries, and how that fits into these dynamics.

Neptune In Aquarius - Any Dream Will Do?

The dreamy, watery and mystically-inclined planet Neptune has recently gone “direct”, stepping forward into its final year-or-so in the sign of Aquarius, where it has been for roughly the last 13 years. Neptune typically spends about 14 years in each sign of the zodiac as it makes its orbit around the Sun. It’s worth taking a little time right now to look at what Neptune has been up to for the last 13 years and how this has been reflected in the world. Neptune represents the collective dream of Paradise, that trouble-free place far away, “somewhere over the rainbow”, that safe harbor “only an ocean away”. If you’ve ever imagined a place “once upon a time” where unity, peace and harmony live happily ever after, you’ve glimpsed Neptune’s world.

Since we do not live in that place and can only long for it, here in the real world Neptune is connected with illusions. What is real, and what is not real? These are Neptunian questions. When Neptune is involved things are not always (or usually) what they seem, for Neptune isn’t a big fan of the “real” world where everything is separated into its own separate set of separate parts.

What happens, then, when cinematic visions of Neptune’s fantasy island are expressed through Aquarius, the sign of holistic social awareness, thinking of the group as a whole, democratic sensibility, and the reality of inter-connectedness?

To answer this, I want to look at popular culture as seen in movies, music and television, some of Neptune’s favorite vehicles of expression. See, with Neptune, the larger image (the dream) can be contained within the smaller image (the movie screen or television), reflecting back to us images and impressions that work like dreams, through the symbolic language of the soul.

I also want to start 180 degrees away from my subject, with the sign opposite Aquarius: Leo, the attention-seeking sign of the bright, shining star, the individual. If we look back to the 1920’s when Neptune was transiting Leo, Hollywood was born. Thanks to Hollywood, we could all get a glimpse of paradise by simply going to the movies. The notion of “celebrity” came to be: the idealized human “star” who could make everyone swoon and fill up with longing to be him or her... or at least touch him or her... or just watch a movie starring him or her... or even just settle for a photograph... or an autograph. The lifestyles of the rich and famous became a fixture in our culture, and glamorous Hollywood celebrities like Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, John Wayne and Bette Davis have hung above us ever since, like beautiful chandeliers lighting our living rooms and our lives. The biggest Hollywood stars earned a great deal of respect and became icons of their day. They represented the dignity, talent and unique, never-to-be-repeated “star quality” at the heart of every Leo.

Cut to: present time. With Neptune in Aquarius, the sign opposing Leo, we’ve seen a horse of a very different color take center stage, for the better and for the dramatically worse. In Aquarius, the whole world is indeed a stage and the star is the everyday person. Set that with the backdrop of our Hollywood tradition, and we get the present day un-glamorous, ordinary, not-necessarily-talent-filled, anything-goes landscape of “reality television”. The star has become not-a-star, for anyone can be the star while Neptune is in Aquarius. Supposedly. Remember, Neptune is connected with illusions.

To put the pieces together a little more, the sign of Aquarius is about accepting the reality that all people really are equal, despite social appearances to the contrary. Aquarius is the sign of the awareness of the reality of inter-connectivity. We are inter-connected whether we know it or not, and Aquarius is about knowing it—the butterfly in Brazil really does affect weather patterns in Iceland with a flap of its wing. When you can contain that level of awareness and integrate it into your actions, you are being Aquarian.

If you look around at what has taken place in the world over the last 13 years, along with the countless extraordinary technical advances that have brought the once-coveted fires of creativity down to the ground level, we have seen an explosion of ground-level talent. With the advent of HD cameras, high quality music production equipment, graphics editors, movie cameras, and movie editing software integrated into and through the personal computer, anyone with the interest and a small budget can become a movie director, a photographer, a graphic artist, a music producer. The tools that were once the realm of the "gods" of the elite and sophisticated record companies or movie studios or photography studios have, in Promethean fashion, dropped into the hands of “ordinary” everyday people.

In the last 13 years, globally, it’s like the flood-gates have opened wide, with hundreds and hundreds of talent shows cropping up everywhere. “Pop Idol” in the UK became the “American Idol” phenomenon in the United States, both of which have led to “Britain’s Got Talent”, “America’s Got Talent”, “So You Think You Can Dance”, “Dancing With the Stars” (where everyday people dance with the stars), “The X Factor”, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”—the same archetypal template that sits over talent searches in the country music field, the movie industry, opera, or West End Theatre (indeed, “Any Dream Will Do”). Talent is booming everywhere, in almost every creative field!

Now, this explosion of talent is paired with its share of the truly untalented and uninspired, as you know if you’ve ever watched the auditions for “American Idol”. Thousands and thousands of people audition for these shows under the illusion (Neptune) that they have talent, or that they stand a chance at fame and fortune.

This template has also taken hold in other fields as well, politics in particular. What was once the realm of the dignified leader (think: Lincoln, FDR, JFK) is now the realm of dangerously unqualified “everyday people” like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell, who treat the political stage as if they are auditioning for a talent competition, rather than seriously considering the true gravity of the leadership roles they are seeking. When everything is considered equal, discerning true talent and qualification from illusion can be troublesome.

This is the other side of Neptune in Aquarius. It used to be that “star quality” meant quality (i.e., that the person was qualified to do what they were doing). Now, not only has celebrity and talent been drained from movies and television in countless ways, the whole idea of quality has become seriously distorted, as if having a dream is qualification enough.

Perhaps the clearest way of looking at Neptune’s illusions in the sign of Aquarius can be seen in the 2007 Pixar movie “Ratatouille”. The star of the movie is a rat, literally—a charming rat named Remy with an utterly engaging and genuine passion for cooking. More to the point, he has a talent—a genius—for cooking. Remy’s inspiration in life is Auguste Gusteau, a five-star French chef and author of the book “Anyone Can Cook”. Says Gusteau:

“Great cooking is not for the faint of heart. You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true—anyone can cook—but only the fearless can be great.”

Is this the truth? Is this illusion? I say it’s both. It resonates similarly to the famous lines, “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires will come to you...”. See, while these notions sound ideal, the key is the heart (Leo), what is truly in your heart (and I would add your soul). They key is in your soul’s inherent light, its unique gifts and talents which are usually quite different than the security-seeking dreams sought by the ego, which are modeled in “Ratatouille” by the aptly-named Ego.

As Ego learned, once he had been genuinely rocked to his core by a meal cooked by a rat:

“In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

This is the truth contained within Gusteau's lines and within Neptune’s passage through the sign of Aquarius. Equality is not about everyone being able to do whatever they want to do in life. Humanity’s sense of “equal opportunity” pales in comparison to the truest equal opportunity employer there ever was: the soul. While Aquarius’ aspirations are always for a more humanitarian and democratic-style society based on principles of unity and justice, the soul is anything but democratic. The soul is rigorous and profoundly truthful. The soul carries the truth whether we care to look at it or not.

Neptune confuses this issue with blurry visions that “any dream will do,” but it’s real intent for us, in Aquarius, is to wash away this illusion and reveal for each individual that dreams are not free-for-all, that each of us has a unique genius to bring forth into the world, a genius and a talent unique to us, true to us regardless of what others may think, the genius of our own heart’s true desire—the heart’s desire that Apollo, the god of the Sun, was after when he proclaimed, “Know thyself.” How well do you know yourself? What is your genius? With Aquarius’ motto “I know,” it’s worth considering in the next year or so what is true about you. Really true. Not pretend-true, but really true.

Remy: I’m sick of pretending. I pretend to be a rat for my father. I pretend to be a human through Linguini. I pretend you exist so I have someone to talk to! You only tell me stuff I already know! I know who I am! Why do I need you to tell me? Why do I need to pretend?
Gusteau: But you don’t Remy. You never did.

If you are a butterfly affecting the whole, are you affecting it with pretend truths about yourself, or real truths? How do you know? What are you affecting it with? While Neptune is in Aquarius, there are no easy answers (Remy was shot at, almost drowned, was separated from his family, went hungry, almost got burned to a crisp in an oven, and had to spend a great deal of time living in someone's hair), but there is truth: "Food always comes to those who love to cook." What's on your plate?