Uranus square Pluto - Rebel Yell, Part 2

“I want  /  to think again of dangerous and noble things  /  I want to be light and frolicsome  /  I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing  /  as though I had wings.”—Mary Oliver, Starlings In Winter

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an Angel!”—Shakespeare, Hamlet

It’s time for further archetypal exploration of the Uranus-Pluto squares!  And by that I mean a really, really, really, really long article! The most recent square occurred on September 19, and the next one will be taking place on May 20, 2013. Even though that is still off in the distant future, the volatile, dynamic Uranus-Pluto energies with all of their complexities are simply part of life now, and will be into March of 2015. Let’s look at how we might wrestle with this intensity on an individual basis, remembering that the real changes taking place are occurring deep inside each of us. What might that look like?

HERE, THERE, and EVERYWHERE

To get us going, here are a couple of nuggets to consider about Uranus in Aries:

In late 1843, Uranus spent about eight months in Aries before dipping back into Pisces for a few weeks, during which time “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens was published, with its call to "Live in the past, the present, and the future!" The beloved novel also brought us the miserable, rigid Scrooge’s infamous encounters with the ghost-spirits of the past, the present, and the future. Then, a few months later in 1844, after Uranus had been back in Aries for a while, Samuel Morse sent the first official electrical telegram, a long-distance message transmitted non-physically.  Curious!  Uranus has an orbit of 84 years, and when Uranus returned to Aries approximately 84 years later, Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first images that would become television.  Fast-forward (with emphasis on the fast) to present day, and we find ourselves immersed in a high-definition culture of iPads, Smart Phones, electronic tablets, and trillions upon trillions of text messages, voice messages, and instant messages—not to mention email messages!  You can see the relatively short period of time (168 years) in which technology has completely altered reality, connecting us invisibly across the entire globe.  These changes have a lot to do with the sense many people have that life has been speeding up for a while now.  Behind this sense is Uranus, breaking tradition and cracking the well-worn concrete pavement of history wide open, inciting revolution to bring in new, fresh, original, “outside of the box” thinking.

THE FLAME

One of Uranus’ main myths is that of Prometheus, the rebellious Titan who stole fire from Zeus, hid the fire inside a fennel stalk, and whisked it down to earth for the benefit of mankind, thus lighting the creative spark in humanity and giving us the ability to inspire, warm, and illuminate our lives and the lives of others.  Quite the noble cause, eh?  Prometheus, whose name means “forethought” (thinking before), also brought humanity science, culture, architecture, and cosmic knowledge (i. e., astronomy and astrology, and in the modern world, the technology that allows us to explore the cosmos).  Where there is fire, there is light, and Uranus-Prometheus carries a bright light.  Not surprisingly, Uranus was discovered during the Enlightenment period of Western history.  Similarly to the nature of that time, Uranus widens our perspective in a flash of insight, allowing us to see much greater connections and potentials where previously we experienced a more limited perspective.  This is the revolution of mind often associated with Uranus.

The tricky part—and it’s seriously tricky—is that while Prometheus’ name means “forethought” (“thinking before”)—forethought actually means more than just thinking ahead of time, planning ahead, or planning for the future.  It also means the thought that came before.  It means the first thought, the thinking that went on beforehand.  Foresight doesn’t just mean looking into the future; it also means seeing into the past, what came before.  Tricky!  Ow!  My brain hurts!  See, Uranus just doesn’t care about the tiny little box we call “time and space.”  It’s like how the Prologue of a book is always at the beginning of the book, even if you’re in the middle of reading the book, experiencing the story unfolding.  At that point, the Prologue that was once a “forethought” now exists before everything you have since read.  If this is confusing, it goes to show how Uranus does not deal with Time in the manner we are most accustomed to:  as a long, linear line.  Uranus gets the whole picture, all at once, without factoring in Time—no waiting.  That’s why it’s called an “a-ha!” moment and not a “hang on, let me think about that for a while” series of moments.  Many myths from ancient cultures suggest that our lives essentially have Prologues, that there is a first thought or image or pattern set out for us before we begin life, an image that captures the whole thing, all at once.  Prior to your actual time-bound life, there is a pattern that came first.  And if we’re talking about firsts, we might as well take a moment to talk about Aries!

Uranus is in the sign of Aries, which is ruled by Mars the God of War.  As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries is about taking initiative, taking first steps, standing up and fighting, and being at the front of the line.  And if you have a problem with that, we can just step outside and handle it man to man.  In a deeper sense, Aries can be heard in the Def Leppard song “Animal,” in the lyrics “I gotta feel it in my blood... and I want, and I need, and I lust... animal.”  Within Aries is this animal instinct, an instinct of the blood, often frowned upon and deemed “primitive” in our otherwise-sophisticated and seemingly-civilized culture, especially because it can be aggressive and violent.  Aries is often considered impulsive, acting before thinking, and causing a lot of problems in that regard.  This kind of talk came up after the fiery, destructive and rebellious riots in recent years in Canada and in London:  people just weren’t thinking.

You can hear Aries, not surprisingly, in the song “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor.  Aries is in the eye of that tiger, and it’s in “the thrill of the fight, rising up to the challenge” of its rivals.  “Tiger, tiger, burning bright” wrote William Blake.  Aries has this constant drive to survive, because it has only recently emerged as a separate force from the great, overwhelming, all-encompassing Piscean ocean into which emerging life can be so easily pulled back and washed away, its fire extinguished, all potential and promise gone to sleep among the fishes.  Aries is the Pioneer in this regard, always stepping foot onto new shores, discovering new vistas and lands, pushing forward, fighting for survival.  Aries is the Warrior, fighting on the side of life.

What does this mean, then, when Uranus is moving through Aries?

Uranus reveals greater connections (a huge picture-vision), yet the vitality of Aries is primarily concerned with being separate and individual.  How does this work?  Well, when we put these two seemingly-conflicted pieces together, Uranus in Aries is awakening the sense of separation within an even larger sense of connection, like in the way the phrase “six degrees of separation” describes just how connected everyone really is.  This is the kind of connection that awakens with Uranus in Aries.  This is the revolution of mind that Uranus invites now:  I am separate and individual, and I am connected to the greater whole.

Let’s pull a small revolution now and apply Uranus to what I have already written about Aries.  We can take the typical notion that Aries “acts before thinking,” turn it around, and ask:  isn’t that called intuition?  Who needs to think something through to make sense of it, when the intuitive hunch makes sense on its own, instantly?  You get the intuition, and you act on it.  Uranus in Aries.  Similarly, the “animal instinct” turns into the instinctive anima, the soul.  What was once considered primitive now becomes sophisticated in its own right, having made the move from ego-driven survival instincts into soul-based intuitive wisdom (the “sophia” of sophisticated means “wisdom”), wisdom rooted in timeless-eternity.  Now we’re talking!  The soul’s wisdom is rooted in a deep sense of each of us as individuals, connected with the original and individual purpose for which each of us came to life, the purpose that continues to animate our lives and be animated by life.  Aries is the first step in the circle of life, and as ancient philosopher Plotinus said, “The soul moves in circles.”  The revolution of Uranus in Aries is, by no small account, a revolution of the soul.

You can see some of this dazzling, mind-bending maneuvering of Uranus in the movie “Minority Report” with its vision of the future, its pre-cogs, and its Pre-Crime Unit founded on foresight, designed to stop criminals before they can even commit the criminal acts they will apparently commit.  You can also see Prometheus in the movie “Prometheus” (couldn’t resist saying that!) in how any genuine, original progress is intimately linked with an origin, an original image.  And you can see these sensibilities perhaps most clearly and radically in the Doctor Who episodes “The Girl In the Fireplace” and “Blink” which both fundamentally operate in a place of time-outside-of-Time and are mini revolutions in and of themselves.  Watch them enough times and you’ll start to get the hang of it.  Like I said, it’s tricky.

THE LAST FULL MEASURE

While Uranus in Aries inspires the new, Pluto in Capricorn expires the old.  When Pluto moves through Capricorn, the traditional world structures can be remade.  An old, confining and claustrophobic order can be replaced with something new.  Pluto in Capricorn reveals the corruption within current systemic structures—the larger structures such as the government that hold our civilization in order, or the smaller structures of our own lives that keep us in order, such as our calendars and clocks.  With both Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries, Time certainly seems to get the short end of the stick, doesn’t it?

You can see this Uranus-Pluto combination quite prominently in Pixar’s latest movie “Brave.”  Imagine independent, fiery red-head Merida in the tight, tight, tight dress her mother (the Queen) required her to wear.  Merida’s dress is a good example of Pluto in Capricorn, because the dress represents generations-old traditions reaching a point of necessary change.  It’s not just the dress that didn’t fit Merida.  It’s a whole way of life, and the whole structure of authority within which she was trying to simply be herself (like an Aries) and live the life she was born to live.  Pluto in Capricorn takes those too-tight, too-restrictive structures (often called “tradition” when they fit well) and undresses them.

Remembering back to my earlier post about Pluto’s connection to the dead, Merida found her way to a new life by following the invisible guidance of her ancestors (in the form of will o’ wisps), the ones who came before.  Which brings us, now, back to Abraham Lincoln.

THE BETTER ANGEL

If all of this jumping around is obnoxious, you’re getting a good taste of Uranus!  With Uranus, Time stops being “back then” and “up ahead” and somehow it all merges into what is called “present time.”  It’s there all at once.  Remember “A Christmas Carol”?  “Live in the past, the present, and the future!”

Here we might see Abraham Lincoln as a Ghost of Christmas Past, not to mention a Ghost of Christmas Future when the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln opens.  For the purposes of this article, what I find most fascinating about Lincoln as President of the United States of America is the scope of his vision, expressed in a most poetic manner, so as to include in his speeches phrases like “the better Angels of our nature” and “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.”  Angels and mysticism gave his vision profound depth and substance.  It’s the same kind of vision that enriched the words of Joshua Chamberlain, enabling him to inspire disillusioned soldiers during the Civil War as if by magic and leave behind a legacy of breathtakingly dignified speeches that still inspire today.  Lincoln and Chamberlain drew from the past, like artists envisioning the future with clear eyes on the present.  If either of our main political contenders today spoke of Angels or mysticism, it would actually be difficult to take them seriously.  Such is the extent to which mystical vision and language of the soul have been stripped from our culture.  So, let’s bring it back (which is what Neptune in Pisces wants to do anyway).

Archetypally speaking, what exactly might the better Angels of our nature be, and what does this have to do with astrology and Uranus?

A main albeit rarely discussed archetype of Uranus is the Angel archetype.  Most typically this is referred to as the Genius archetype, though even then it’s not usually mentioned as an actual archetype.  Talk of geniuses usually brings up Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein or a similar figure.  But deep inside the roots of the word genius reside its true meaning:  “a guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth.”  Genius isn’t about intelligence.  Rather, it’s about the inborn gifts each human being possesses, gifts held within the original vision of each individual life, an original vision that contains the whole picture of one’s life in the form of a pattern or design or story or image (think, for example, of an astrological chart), and in its one-of-a-kind manner makes each of us an original.  It’s not that I am a genius or you are a genius; rather, it’s about:  what is your genius?  What are you here to do?  What are you here to contribute to life that nobody else can?  These are perhaps some of the most important questions to consider at this time.

The Genius refers to your innate you-ness, and also to the invisible winged spirit guiding you along the way in life.  The same notion was given the name daimon in Greek culture, genie in North African culture, and the Guardian Angel in Christian culture.  Perhaps Abraham Lincoln knew something of this Angel when he appealed to the better Angels of our nature.  See, to him it was natural; in our nature resides an Angel.  It’s second-nature.  What we refer to today as a genius and isolate to a few really smart individuals can really be applied as an Angel or a Genie or a Daimon to the greater whole and refers to all individuals.

Abraham Lincoln’s genius was (among many things) a vision of freedom.  Decades later, General Patton’s genius was an absolute ruthless fortitude in bringing down Hitler.  Seriously, could anyone else have done that?  Steven Spielberg’s genius is movie-making.  Barbra Streisand’s genius is her voice.  It’s not really just one thing, though.  The Angel watches over the whole of your life, guiding you along a path that is uniquely yours, designed and tailored to your genius.  We see this in the story of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, or Nestor the Long-eared Christmas Donkey.  We see it more recently in Ratatouille.  Remy the Rat was a weirdo—a term often applied to Uranian people or Aquarians.  If you research the word “weird” you’ll probably find it strangely becoming, because that’s what it means:  becoming strange.  And it ties in with everything I have been writing about here.  Aquarian Charles Dickens’ genius was his writing, full of weird and unforgettable characters.  And, last but not least for now, Samuel Morse’s genius was envisioning the invisible transmission of messages across time and space, wholly resonant of the original instant messengers themselves, the Angels—the carriers of intuitive guidance, leading us on our individual paths.

There is still so much to explore as time goes on, but for now we shall wrap this up, lest it carry on like the Civil War, much, much, much longer than anyone (including me) anticipated.

THE REBEL YELL

In her song “The Power of the Dream” Celine Dion sings, “Deep within each heart there lies a magic spark that lights the fire of our imagination.”  This is the fire Prometheus stole.  It’s the eternal flame of creativity and passion, the solar fire, the fire that lights up the human imagination, which in turn illuminates our lives.  It is the fire of the human heart, the center of imagination, carried on the wings of love with its eternal connection to the spirit and soul.  Yet, remember back to Part 1 of my post, and back to 1865 when, symbolically speaking, the heart lost the Civil War.  We can see the remnants of that loss everywhere in our culture, from the loss of soul to the loss of basic rights and freedoms; from the crumbling of the education system to the absurd national debt; and from the antics on Wall Street to the length of the lines at every pharmacy—all turning the better angels of our creative nature into something far more destructive and some would even say demonic.

Back during the Civil War, the rebel yell was a battle cry used by the Southern Confederate soldiers.  In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Killer Angels” Michael Shaara describes it as “that ripply sound that raised the hair, that high thin scream from far away coming out of the mist unbodied and terrible, inhuman.  The scream of a flood of charging men:  the rebel yell.”  Today, in 2012, the rebel yell of the solider has become the Rebel Yell of the Soul, waking us up to the eternal side of life as well as our unique, individual call to action.  There is something inhuman in human nature, something miraculous and wonderful, a fierce force that fights and guides and guards and protects us as we proceed.  If that was lost along with the heart a couple of centuries ago, be sure that it is calling again now, louder than ever.  The seven Uranus-Pluto squares over the next three years bring to my mind the image of a defibrillator, with enough electrical voltage to re-awaken, resuscitate, and re-animate the lost, shattered and broken heart of our culture back into life.  It will take a unique and original rebellion in which each brave individual can participate at any time, a risky rebellion of purpose—fighting to be who you were born to be—and most certainly backed by an army of Angels.

Uranus square Pluto - Rebel Yell, Part 1

“The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far, enables men to do things they did not dream themselves capable of before, and which they were not capable of alone.”—Joshua Chamberlain, 20th Maine, 1888

“The time to stand has come at last… let the drums start their long, long roll...”—The Glory, from The Civil War (musical) 

Beginning this summer—June 24 to be precise—we have the first of many dramatic square aspects between the planets Uranus (in the sign of Aries) and Pluto (in Capricorn), as they instigate impossible-to-ignore dynamic tensions over the next three years.  All in all, they will look squarely toward each other 7 times, the last aspect being on March 16, 2015.  In order to do some justice to this prolonged engagement of planetary powerhouses, let’s spread our wings, explore the archetypal patterns involved, and perhaps see how we might engage, during this historic period of revolution, with what Abraham Lincoln once referred to as “the better Angels of our nature.”

PERSPECTIVE 

Uranus and Pluto are huge energies, and they inspire nothing less than revolutionary change (the Uranus part) and transformation (the Pluto part).  As “outer planets” their reach is collective.  And while their impact is collective (affecting the whole), individuals are part of that collective.  When Uranus and Pluto impact our personal lives, their aims are impersonal, greater than just me or you.  Huge energies!

Now, it seems to me that revolutionary change and transformation are familiar terms these days, as the world in which we live shakes, rattles and rolls daily, and change on multiple levels seems to be the nature of our times.  Before Uranus even begins its first square to Pluto, we have seen governments and tyrants fall, a massive tsunami, multiple powerful earthquakes, barbaric riots in otherwise civilized cities, political protests, radical economic swings, unprecedented and unpredictable lines of tornadoes, sink holes, historic wild fires and other extreme weather patterns, and countless bizarre murders.  We might be forgiven any exhaustion that has crept into our lives in the wake of extensive, multi-leveled, rapid change.  Looking ahead, then, Uranus-Pluto makes me ask in exasperated tones, “What!?!  There’s more?!  We’re only just beginning?”  And with that, a Medusa-like paralysis sets in as I stare at the dark and tangled mess ahead of us.  How to deal with this?  How to not freeze up?

A first key here might just be that the real changes involved with “revolutionary change” and “transformation” are taking place at the invisible level.  This is important.  Transformation really occurs at a deeper internal level which cannot be seen or easily grasped.  The physical reality of things will continue to shift, quake, rock, burn, riot and rot for some time—that’s part of Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn.  At the outset, however, we can consider that transformation is first and foremost beyond the level of form.  It is trans-form, after all.  Transformational change is psychological change and archetypal change, changes which occur at the soul level, deep within, at the mythic and imaginal realm of the psyche.  This is what I want to explore here.  First up, let’s look at Uranus and Pluto.

URANUS and PLUTO

You can read much more about Uranus in my previous post here.  For the purposes of this post, Uranus in myth is Ouranos, the sky god, the sky itself, and the starry heavens.  Ouranos is not just the sky above, however—horizon to horizon—but rather the whole blue sky wrapping itself around the entire earth.  As sky rather than earth, concept over matter, Ouranos-Uranus is a bit hard to grasp and hold, requiring us to reach out beyond the traditional world of form.  Unbridled, Uranus is the Rebel that bucks traditional form, and the Revolutionary that breaks free from previous patterns to engage new and uncertain terrains of life.  Uranus is erratic, eclectic, exciting and electric.  His nature is innovative and inspired.  His ideas (more like principles) are noble, always seeking to better the human condition.  When he strikes, like lightning, he strikes quickly and suddenly, kind of like those YouTube videos that go viral so quickly.  Who knows what catches fire next?  To acknowledge Uranus is to acknowledge the unpredictable nature of life.  Life simply cannot be predicted.  This is amplified in times of great change.  As Joshua Cooper Ramo writes in his book The Age of the Unthinkable, “Change produces unpredictability and surprise.  That means that any time we push for change... we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that much of what we’ll get is unpredictable.”  The Internet has Uranus in its origins, a still-new technology interconnecting the globe in ways we can never fully grasp, and if you think of how much the world has changed in unpredictable ways since the Internet began, you begin to sense what Uranus is about.

Pluto, on the other hand, is death and transformation.  In myth, Pluto is the god of the Underworld, that mysterious, shadowy realm of the dark unlit depths within.  In the days of sundials, when the light of the Sun reflected the time of day, as the Sun descended into the Underworld each evening and darkness fell, the world would once again become time-less.  Likewise, the Underworld is that timeless realm of the soul, that place only the soul could enter after leaving the human world behind (death).  As the Lord of the Underworld, Pluto’s grave task is to oversee the rich, dark shadows of soul, its tangled webs, ghostly presences, troubled fates and haunted stories that reach back for generations and generations.

Pluto transits in any zodiacal sign reveal the stench and messy decay within anything well past its natural expiration date.  In Capricorn this is the structures that hold worldly authority, be they governments, big business corporations, other institutions both literal and figurative, or Time itself.

On a much deeper level (where the Lord of the Underworld prefers to be met anyway) Pluto is the richness of the life experience in the ever-present shadow of death, the value found only in that dark vale, discovered only by lifting the veil of the ordinary and the literal, and peering within.  Inside and underneath the visible is always the in-visible.  Pluto actually means “riches,” and refers to the kind of wealth found in the aftermath of the most difficult experiences life has to offer – crises,  deaths, and other tragedies – as well as in the most meaningful soul to soul exchanges between people, the kind of connections that get under your skin, far beneath the surface level, and irrevocably change your whole experience of life.

I caught a glimpse of Pluto in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf warns Frodo, “Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment.  Even the very wise cannot see all ends.”  Pluto is the wise god who sees more ends than most, for he sees all ends of life.  When we meet Pluto we meet the end, and in Pluto’s Underworld all ends meet.  Somehow Pluto manages to tie together the frayed ends of the long threads of the fabric of life, threads that weave and extend far beyond the span of any one life, one time, or one place.  Again from The Age of the Unthinkable:  “Dead trees can continue to play a role in a forest’s ecology for decades, providing nutrition and shelter for animals even as nitrogen leaches from their dead branches into the ground, fertilizing new generations of plants.”  This is true of human lives as well, seen as we reach back toward the literature, poems, paintings, and stories of ages past, the memorials and jewels left behind by the dead to nourish and fertilize our current lives and the black soil of imagination.  Think:  Dead Poets Society.  This is Pluto.  Life after literal death is always the beginning of soul life.  And because Pluto’s realm is timeless, what we call the after-life is never really “after” anything (no time, no “after”) – it is always present, now.  In every moment, in every person, in every thing, in every place, and in every shadow, soul lives.

What is by now hopefully obvious about Uranus and Pluto is their vital connection to the invisible realm, the eternal realm, their connection to our interior and the “other side” of life.  The planets Uranus and Pluto (and Neptune) cannot be seen with the naked eye, and symbolically they connect us with the things in our world which cannot be seen with the naked eye.  To engage with Uranus and Pluto is to engage with the invisible world.

OK – so what?  The world is still changing at a freakishly rapid and unsettling pace.  Anxieties are high.  Crises continue to mount.  Still feeling a bit like Perseus dealing with Medusa?

Well, the other piece I want to note here before you and I freeze up and seize entirely is the actual myth of Medusa and how our hero Perseus confronted this figure of overwhelming darkness and fear:  through reflection.  Perseus was able to solve his Medusa syndrome by not looking at her directly.  He looked at her indirectly—in the reflection of his shield—and acted accordingly.  In other words, we can look backward through reflection to gain a wider and deeper perspective on what’s happening, and through reflection can gain some genuine insight.  And that’s what I want to do now.  Let’s gather up what we know about Uranus and Pluto, hold our reflective shield in hand, and go back—perhaps in unexpected Uranian style (surprise!)—to the year 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina, and look at the U.S. Civil War.

AFFAIRS OF THE HEART 

The U.S. Civil War is not directly connected to this Uranus-Pluto square (though Aries is the sign ruled by Mars, the God of War), and I am by no means an historian or expert on the Civil War.  We’re off to a confidence-inspiring start, yes?  If you’re wondering what I’m up to, just remember Pluto, and do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment just yet.  Hang in there and you’ll see what I’m up to.

What began as a war to maintain the unity of the United States ended up as the harrowing, heart-rending and heroic fight between the North and the South to end slavery in the name of freedom.  There are many facts, many battles, and many key figures from that particularly dark and formative time in the history of the United States.  Its significance can never be underestimated.  And, there are volumes upon volumes written detailing the war from many angles.  I want to take just one dynamic in particular, however, and look at the invisible nature hidden within, to see what it might reveal archetypally, and how the end of the Civil War—in Plutonic fashion—might be very much alive and active in the psyche of the United States today.  And, because the United States today has a profound impact within the whole globe, it seems important.

If at the ground level the Civil War was between the northern United states and the southern Confederate states, there might be something significant if we zoom in on the archetype of North and the archetype of South.  See, north and south aren’t just literal directions.  Yes, we can look up (north), and we can look down (south); and we can see above and below.  But we can also feel uplifted, and we can also feel down in the dumps.  North and South exist in our images of ascending to heaven or descending into hell.  We have flights of fancy, or downfalls and depressions.  North and South are present in songs like “You Raise Me Up” and “Rolling In the Deep.”  With a timeless archetypal perspective, North and South become much more than they initially seem.

To build on this further, in North we have the spirit, with its uplifting attitudes, outward expansions and transcendent (off the earth) “peak” experiences, like winged Icarus soaring toward the sun.  In South we have the soul, with its downward descents, inner life, and dark depressive moods (like Icarus, again, now falling into the oceanic depths).  If rainy days and Mondays always bring you down, you are experiencing a sense of South.  This archetypal perspective is alive in our bodies, too, with the mind (it is said of some people that they have “nothing going on upstairs”) – again, North – and the heart with its ever-present desires to fall in love.  The mind can be said to be full of hot air (like an inflated balloon ascending into the clouds), and we tend to want to get down to the heart of a matter.  It’s fascinating to me that from the brooding heart of the post-Civil War “Deep South” emerged the Blues.  And from the Blues emerged country music full of loss and longing for what has been lost, with all of its melancholy blues, sad eyes, broken wings, long goodbyes, bad goodbyes, lonesome doves, friends in low places, falling to pieces, learning to live again, learning to fly again, and lyrical sentiments like, “When you’re flying high, take my heart along / I’ll still be here when you come back down.”

With no desire to grossly over-simplify historical events, I am suggesting that the battle between the North and South in the Civil War was not just a literal battle between the northern states and the southern states, but also an archetypal battle between North and South as states of being:  mind and heart, thinking and feeling, spirit and soul.

This seems important at this juncture of history, because the South lost the Civil War.  And when the South lost, so did the heart.  No wonder country music sings so often of having lost.  This loss of the heart seems particularly important to me because heart disease is, and has been for quite some time, the number one killer in America.  The heart that attacks and takes us down is the number one killer in the country.  It’s worth noting that acclaimed women’s health expert Dr. Christiane Northrup once said, “In the battle between the heart and the mind, the heart will always win.”

This North-South idea emerged quite clearly in popular culture recently.  In the charming new show “Hart of Dixie,” for example (with its ad stating "Her Life Is About To Go South"), the south is the backdrop for a young female surgeon from New York who is strong on intelligence and will, but who lacks the warmth and heartfelt bedside manner required to genuinely connect with her patients.  She moves to the south after inheriting the medical practice left to her by the dead father she never even knew she had.  Likewise, “A Gifted Man” showed a New York brain surgeon famous for his skill and his cold demeanor, bereft of heart, who had to learn to split his time between his up-scale established practice on one side of town, and a down-scale free clinic for poor people on the other, a job that would require him to learn to connect with patients from his heart.  What propelled his life in this direction was a visit from his dead ex-wife.  In both shows we see the dark wisdom and Underworld ways of Pluto working behind the scenes of life.

An aside:  If you’re wondering, “Why surgeons?” my hunch is it’s because the Surgeon archetype is skilled at repairing precisely what has been damaged, which is an archetypal dynamic to explore when Saturn moves into Scorpio in October.

Neptune In Pisces - The Invisible Bridge

“Valley’s deep and the mountain’s so high  /  If you want to see God you’ve got to move on the other side.”—John Lee On Friday, February 3, Neptune entered Pisces for the next 13 years.

In my first piece last spring about Neptune’s move into Pisces ("Home I'll Be"), I focused on Neptune’s longings, and how imagination allows us to see and experience the world as something miraculous.  Since I didn’t go into much detail about actually doing that, I want to pick up where that piece left off.  How does imagination fit into this?  What do we do when Neptune seems to call us away from the world in which we live, into a world of fantastic imaginings, heightened longings, poignant nostalgias, or a sense that what we’re dealing with in the practical world just isn’t satisfying?  If Neptune is associated with “escapism,” does that mean there’s something fishy about the imagination?  Let’s dive in and see!

LA MER

Neptune is named after the god of the seas, so let’s start with the biggest seas of them all:  the oceans.  Neptune in astrology is oceanic.  It’s epic, vast, expansive, enveloping, and seductive.  If we look at earth itself, 71% of the planet is covered and filled by oceans, and the oceans are teeming with colorful, diverse and abundant life.  From enormous, elegant blue whales to microscopic plankton, intriguing orange sea horses to mysterious pink jellyfish, yellow starfish to great white sharks, giant green turtles to lean swordfish.  We find octopi that shoot black ink when under threat, and cute poisonous puffers (“blowfish”) that inflate themselves and show their pointy bits when in danger.  All of these finned and gilled beings weave in and out of the constantly shifting waterscape, sometimes making their way through the occasional remains of ships lost at sea, those vessels wracked and wrecked by violent and stormy waves, their crews and treasures buried indefinitely among the pastel and fluorescent-colored coral reefs, the turquoise, teal, and other moody blues of the deep-sea trenches.

Note: virtually all of this happens beneath the surface.

The oceans of earth are as violent as they are serene, as tumultuous as they are tranquil, and as dangerous as they are alluring.  In trying to imagine all they contain, our minds and visions are stretched far and wide, high and low.  And there’s so much water!  “Your ocean is an image of eternity, I think,” said Queen Elizabeth to Walter Raleigh in the movie “Elizabeth:  The Golden Age.”  Amidst all of this visionary majesty, what’s a little land-locked mortal to do?  Combine that with William Blake’s classic statement, “The world of Imagination is the world of Eternity.”  And Novalis, who believed that “eternity could be reached through imagination and imagination was the realm of poetry.”  Which brings us to one of the key archetypes of both Neptune and Pisces...

THE POET ARCHETYPE

With Neptune in Pisces, we have the opportunity to perceive the world as if we are all great poets.  For centuries and centuries, great poets have been peering at the everyday world through symbolic eyes, painting pictures with words, bringing figures of speech to life, and sculpting metaphors that link the physical world in front of us with the magical and animated world of the imagination, turning concepts into art.  It’s as if every individual thing in the world becomes 71% ocean, full of colorful, animated life swimming beneath its surface.  Life comes alive!  For Emily Dickinson, hope was not just an idea – it was “the thing with feathers.”  Hope has wings to fly!  For William Wordsworth we aren’t just born into the world as ordinary babies; rather, “trailing clouds of glory do we come.”  For Hafiz, a leaf is not just a leaf, but rather “a singing cleaning woman, dusting all the shelves in the air” with her elegant green rags.  Through imagination,  life isn’t just “business as usual,” unless business as usual is a trip down the Yellow Brick Road, replete with witches, talking trees, poppy fields, flying monkeys and an Emerald City up ahead.  To connect the ordinary world with its roots in imagination, as Poets do, is one of Neptune’s gifts.  It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not really supposed to.  As the great 19th century Romantic poet John Keats put it, “Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.”

Speaking of Keats, one of his most famous lines can help us expand on this connection between the ordinary, natural world, and the fantastic world of imagination.  In one of his letters he writes, “Call the world if you please ‘The vale of soul-making’ Then you will find out the use of the world.”  Let this be our Neptunian bridge, connecting the imagination and the world around us.

SOUL 

To call the world the “vale of soul-making” first requires us to acknowledge the world.  This can be tough when the Siren’s call of Eternity enchants us elsewhere, pulling us to some unseen home away from home.  Yet, here we all are.  Here we are, amidst the deep valleys, rocky mountains, expansive prairies; underneath ever-changing clouds, skies of blue and pink and purple and red and black; alongside insects, countless trees, rolling hills, city sidewalks, glass windows; and immersed in chirping, tweeting (not that kind), barking, cawing, mooing, purring, honking, and howling.  How does this life in the valley called earth “make” soul?  With the soul’s influence via Neptune, skyscrapers can heighten our senses, valleys can depress our everyday lives into deeper feeling, the friendly skies can expand our sights, and those sidewalks can encourage our wanderings.

Where Keats calls the world the vale of soul-making, poet Mary Oliver writes that “the world offers itself to your imagination / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.”  Rather than follow Neptune’s call away from this world, we need only engage with this world through the imagination—the world calls us and we call the world in mutual response, engaging the soul of it all.  Our vocation, our calling, is to live.  We are called to live, and life calls us.  Engaging with the world via the imagination is about feeling the world, seeing its signs and wonders, hearing its voices, seeing its imagery, touching the world and letting the world touch you.  The soul speaks in symbols, images and signs, and the world is packed-to-overflowing with soul.  To engage Neptune in Pisces within this world is to engage the soul of the world.

Later in the 19th century another of those great poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote, “For so the whole round earth is every way / Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”  Now there’s an image!

NEPTUNE AND OIL

In astrology, Neptune “rules” oil.  This typically means that Neptune transits can reflect oil issues in some way, be it oil prices, oil dependency, etc.  In a different way, perhaps—keeping the poetic eye intact—we might say that imagination is the oil of the psyche.  Imagination is what keeps the gears of the psyche turning, visioning, wondering, enchanting, imaging.  Imagination keeps the engines of life moving, spinning an endless array of creative visions that fashion the world around us, and create the cultural fashions that Neptune also rules.

Ancient Greek culture considered the heart the center of imagination.  Without imagination, the world becomes only literal, what you see is what you get; nothing more, nothing less.  Boring!  Without imagination, we end up like the Tin Man, fixed and immobile on the winding and circling Yellow Brick Road of life, cranky and creaky, waiting for someone to come along and oil our stuck joints, to once again give us flexibility to bend and curve where and when necessary, and to give us a heart.

Neptune changing signs is like a global oil change.  The images that keep our gears turning are changing.  When Neptune moved through Aquarius we all experienced the heady, technical genius of the Internet connecting us all together; we saw the technology and special effects in movies explode into unprecedented HD clarity and complexity; and we saw talent bloom on “reality” shows along with some of the colder and less compassionate aspects of humanity.  With Neptune in Pisces we’ll likely see the images soften a bit.  Lady Antebellum sings in their beautiful song “The Heart of the World,” that “oil is the soul of the engine / ... love is the heart of the world.”  Neptunian love is compassion, and Neptune in Pisces can bring out the compassionate side of humanity in new ways, especially as we are consciously connected as a globe like never before.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

Poets take a decidedly Neptunian view of the world, via the imagination.  I’ve quote a number of poets in this piece to emphasize the link between the poet’s vision and imagination, and to steer imagination far and away from the notion that it’s something merely “made up.”  Poets connect the natural world and the imaginal world seamlessly.  They devise poems with metaphor, and metaphor means “to carry over.”  Neptune is the invisible bridge that allows us to carry over the images of imagination into physical form.  What images are you carrying over?  What’s in your imagination?

Another of Tennyson’s famous lines reads, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”  Remember from my first piece last spring that all new life emerges from water.  With Neptune’s waters washing through Pisces between now and 2024, our imaginings of a new world can become tangible, and we can embrace a truly enchanted view of an alive life, a renewed life, where “once upon a time” is now, and where “somewhere over the rainbow” is here.  We can sense the extraordinary beauty and other-worldly grace that makes life down here in the valley, right here and right now in this world, quite marvelous, really.  Here’s to water, and here’s to life!