“Illusions give such color to the world,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald to a friend, “that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”
This is a beautiful description of Neptune, the planet that dominates the skies this month. Neptune bewitches us with either transcendent imagination or self-delusion, depending on how well we know ourselves.
In November we will be subject to this test, when Neptune (illusion) and Chiron (wounds) conjoin while stationing back-to-back. Neptune goes direct on the sixth; Chiron the day before. They stop only minutes of arc apart, and on the same degree of the zodiac where they conjoined with Jupiter for the Super Conjunction of 2009: 26°Aquarius. Stations strengthen transits, and this inscrutable double station is particularly powerful because it is so rare. This is the last time in our lifetimes that Neptune and Chiron will occupy the same degree.
Know Thyself
Every spiritual tradition worth its salt has the same core concept: Know Thyself. Repetition has made this dictum into a cliché, but it remains the quintessential truth of consciousness work. Nor is it as simple as it sounds, for it has a catch: If we want to follow it sincerely we have to distinguish our self-delusions from our essence.
Workable variations on the Know-Thyself theme are everywhere available. Buddhism offers techniques for noticing our delusions and then transcending them. Psychotherapy uses the talking cure to expose their sources in childhood. EST, the Landmark forum, The Secret et al propose that we isolate out our stories, drop them and get on with life.
The one thing that’s indispensable with this process is a scalpel-sharp self-honesty. Whether we follow a methodology or go it alone, every seeker who aspires to transcend her psycho-spiritual limitations will be challenged, sooner or later, to answer the question: Who am I without my autobiographical pictures? This is the question the Neptune-Chiron conjunction is asking us right now, and we can winnow them down to three steps. In the absence of an organization, a coach or a self-help book, try following the transit’s instructions:
1. Identify where you’ve been in denial.
2. Let go of denial.
3. Change.
Astrology makes Step #1 easy. Take a look at your own chart, and consider where Neptune is right now. What house does 26 Aquarius fall in, in your chart? What aspects does it form to your natal planets? Scoping out the conjunction’s transiting placement will tell you which of your delusions are aching to be revealed and released. It will have been in the same general part of your chart for a while, given how slowly this planet moves along its orbit (Neptune takes 168 years to go through the zodiac).
In an attempt to connect us deeper into ourselves, Neptune and Chiron sometimes seem to leach the meaning out of the department of life represented by the house through which they are transiting. The life experiences in question will have perhaps been feeling attenuated, thin and lifeless. This is because the illusions attached to them have zapped their vitality. Although this part of our life may not have changed in an objective sense, to us it may have started to seem false, silly, even absurd.
This transit makes Step #2 – releasing denial — attractive, mostly because it makes holding onto denial so hard.
The Transit through the Houses
Neptune’s transit through the sixth house, for example, can make our work feel pointless. Or it may be our physical health that registers the malaise; using vague, vacillating symptoms to prompt a more subtle attention from us. Chiron, meanwhile, is about hurting; though its intention is to use hurt as a marker, like a pointer in a power point presentation. If we follow where the transit is pointing, we’ll see that a truth about ourselves wants to emerge. It has been trying to emerge for several years, but has been mired in denial.
Together, Neptune and Chiron are demanding that we go beyond self-pity and victimhood. They are daring us to summon up the spiritual courage to do Step #2. If we do, Step #3 is a snap: it happens automatically. And it transforms our lives.
If Neptune and Chiron are transiting your seventh house, you know painful relationship patterns are the issue. This is an invitation to dentify them and drop them. If the transit falls in your fourth, ancestral ghosts – possibly from the mother line – can now fade into mist. Their work with you is done. If in the 12th ghosts from even further back, from pervious incarnations, can lose their hold on you. Usher them out with respect.
If the conjunction falls near the MC of your natal chart, take the plunge into those unsettling career issues that may have been prickling under the surface for decades. If you’re not doing work that feeds your soul, you have been suffering. Do a ritual this month that affirms your intention to make your vocation into an avocation. If the transit is in your second house, you’re being called to adopt a more subtle understanding of money and self-support (my download, Money and Power, addresses this issue) — more subtle than the collective attitudes you’ve been absorbing.
If Neptune and Chiron are in your third house right now, painful mental patterns are ready to be confronted and eliminated. Distraction and chronic escapism are common addictions of the mind; they siphon off energy that we could be using for imaginative thinking. If Neptune and Chiron are in your eighth house, ask yourself whether there are episodes from past intimate relationships that have been serving inhibiting your sexual vitality. If the conjunction falls in your fifth house, consider your self-conception as a creative person. Where have you been kidding yourself? Your view of your own artistry may have been either self-inflating or self-deflating. Whichever the case, forgive yourself for harboring them and surrender them to the cause of authenticity.
Neptune and Chiron in the ninth house means you’re being asked to own up to delusions you might have had about teachers and teachings, and to release them despite your fear of Demon Doubt.
In the eleventh house, the conjunction is inviting you to admit to false friendships, and/or to having been seduced by groupthink against the better interests of your life purpose. If this transit falls on or near your Ascendant, allow the self-portraiture you’ve been cultivating all your life to melt off you, like grimy old curb ice dissolving under the noonday Sun.
These thumbnail delineations are not meant to be exhaustive; just to plant a seed. This conjunction represents liberation, and your higher self wants it to happen. It is fated to happen, and astrology tells us it’s meant to happen now. But if it is to happen gracefully we need to collude in the process. We need to help it along, by being conscious. Otherwise we open ourselves up to the shadow side of the transit, which swamps us in dark Neptune – confusion and anxiety — and dark Chiron – wounds without meaning.
Both Chiron (aboriginal pain) and Neptune (empathy) are subtle archetypes, easily misunderstood. Part of the reason we so often go wrong with their teachings is that in the modern world, we don’t hold compassion as a high priority, and we don’t value the process by which pain leads to compassion. We can’t imagine that pain could serve any purpose ; our conventional healing modalities, even many New Age (“Be happy!”) ones, bristle at the very idea. Even when we do concede that past hurts deepen us, unless we make the distinction between pain and suffering, Chiron’s wounds smack of pathology; the notion of honoring them may strike us as masochistic.
So a great deal depends on the approach we take to this transit. Our degree of openness to leaving conventional attitudes behind can make the difference between despair and magical glory.
