It’s a once-in-168-year event. In a year chock-full of world-altering transits, it’s one of the most important. The god of the sea is inaugurating a thirteen-year-long shift in the way we look at water. To people with water-dominant charts, Neptune’s entry into Pisces on February 3rd will feel the way a drop of water must feel when it finally reaches the sea.
The archetype of water means many things. On the level of physical reality, Neptune governs drinking water, oceans and rivers, pipelines, gas and oil, leaks and spillages. Maximally strong in the sign of the fishes, Neptune will provoke all of these Earthly manifestations of the water principle, causing them to swell into group consciousness with a new poignancy.
And of course this ingress isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s taking place against the backdrop of the overriding transit of the era, now getting closer by the day: the Uranus-Pluto square, the longest arm of the Cardinal Cross.
The Uranus and Pluto cycle, which began when Uranus met up with Pluto in a conjunction during the1960s, charts the seeding and flowering of cultural revolution. Its job is to overthrow stale, old, bankrupt aspects of collective life. The square’s approach during 2011 has already introduced us to a brand new era of possibility, what with political uprisings all over the planet, a breakdown of economic sureties everywhere, and an environmental urgency that is changing the way humans think about life on Earth.
Projects Backfire
When we combine the symbolism of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto, one of the trends that arises is an explosive eruption (Uranus) of toxicity (Pluto) occurring with water systems (Neptune). We can expect water issues to lead the pack upcoming among the life-and-death issues facing the world environment.
This means keeping our eyes on developments like the disastrous Keystone pipeline, still being promoted by a coalition of the usual get-rich-quick suspects (maybe we should lobby for a law against ecocide denial, just as there is against Holocaust denial). As these transits dominate the skies, we will be seeing the backfiring of a number of profit-driven water projects.
There are plenty of them vying for the crown of Most-Ecocidal-Idea-0f-2012. One of them is BP’s continuance of deepwater drills in the Gulf of Mexico, site of their catastrophic oil rig explosion in 2010. These monstrous polluters are not only still pumping, but have been sprouting leaks with impunity in recent months. Getting even less attention, in the Nigerian delta Chevron — whose profits last quarter broke a record, by the way — has been getting away with murder, quite literally, in their efforts to silence local fishermen who have been struggling to stop the fouling of local water ways. Similarly, in the Amazon rainforest, a plan to build the world’s third-largest dam on indigenous land is now working its way through the Brazilian courts. In the American Yosemite, the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a desecration that is said to have broken the heart of wilderness visionary John Muir, is once again under discussion.
And this may be the year when California’s long-simmering water wars finally boil over. Remember the movie Chinatown?
Spiritual Pollution
With Neptune and Chiron both in Pisces, those who prize their sanity will need to be clearer than ever about the dangers of this archetype in its low-level of expression. We’re going to need to watch out for fuzzy thinking and denial (Neptune) where deep healing is required (Chiron). Escapist longings are strong when Neptune is prominent in the sky; whether through sex, beer or prescription drugs, sleep, work or depression.
Even if we do not, ourselves, eat of the Lotus, we have to factor in the reality that just about everybody else does. We live in a world where self-medication is normative. Of relevance here are two facts. One: a new study reports that almost one quarter of American women age 40 to 59 take antidepressants. Two: the tap water most of us use is reclaimed sewerage effluent. This means it’s a good bet that when we fill our glass at the sink we’re about to drink somebody else’s Zoloft.
Moreover, there is the psychic dimension of Neptune to consider. We move through our lives in constant contact with others, picking up the vibrations like an amoeba in a pond; we are surrounded by the messages of the corporate media as if by polluted water. Citizens of modern capitalist societies are subjected to some kind of advertising at every waking moment, and, given the cunning and repetition of visual and aural tropes in commercials, probably in our sleep as well.
It is not surprising that the default consciousness of modern humans in groups — that is, of those with sufficient resources to be free from the incessant struggle to just stay alive — seems to be a semi-voluntary numbness. This means that those who wish to avoid drinking the KoolAid need to take extra precautions.
Like all outer planets, Neptune has a shadow a mile long. The warnings we get from traditional astrology about this planet’s misuse are legendary. They include fraud and deceit, self-delusion and self-loss. But we would expect nothing less when we are dealing with an archetype this powerful; the bigger they come, the harder they fall. As with the Uranus-Pluto square, humanity is getting strong cosmic medicine as a function of how out of balance we have become.
Higher Neptune
That said, those who want to step out of the negative-Neptune pattern will experience the Pisces transit as a liberation. To taste the sweetness of high-level Neptune, we must cultivate a detachment from the unhealthy aspects of group life while at the same time staying in touch with what the mass mind is up to. For Americans, this might mean glancing at the cover of People Magazine with our peripheral vision; or noticing what propaganda Fox News is pumping out this week, to cater to the prejudices of its viewers — noticing it without becoming ensnared by it.
Neptune is the symbol of the illusory nature of this world; what Hinduism calls Maya. With an appreciation for the cosmic lessons at hand, we can inform ourselves about the foibles of our era, as a sociologist might. We might get to the point where we approach these foibles with genuine curiosity; for, when we are not manipulated by them, the misadventures of an ungrounded collective are more fascinating than the most wildly improbable science fiction.
It’s about keeping our finger on the pulse of what currently passes for reality, while keeping our distance.
Like the Cardinal square above us, Neptune in Pisces has the capacity to transform the world, one individual consciousness at a time. It teaches that we are all little corks bobbing around in the same experiential sea. When we allow ourselves to open up to it, we glimpse the great truth behind material existence: unconditional interconnectedness.
It is a realization that, when it comes, comes in a flood.
