On the first weekend in June, Mercury retrograde (June 7^th) inaugurates a three-week review of all things Mercurial. We’ll be reconsidering the ways we get around (driving, walking, running, riding the subway) as well as the ways we read, speak, listen, and figure things out.¹

Mars and the Cross

A week after the station, Mars re-ignites the Uranus-Pluto square, unleashing the power of deep and fractious change. On the 13^th-14^th Mars squares Pluto exactly, and on June 24^th-25^th, opposes Uranus exactly. This will be a solstice to remember.

Mars activates and agitates whatever it touches, like a stick poked into a hornets’ nest. We’ve seen this repeatedly over the past few years (most recently this past April), every time Mars passes through a cardinal sign.

Whenever Mars sets off the three outer planets (Uranus, Neptune or Pluto), don’t expect things to be nice and pretty. Something far more important is taking place. We’re getting a shot at self-knowledge.

When we show up for transits like these, we start to feel a hunger to be free of certain habits and social masks. Mere comfort isn’t enough. Complacency becomes more and more unappealing.

Let us adjust our expectations accordingly. Instead of hoping for an easy time of it, let us open ourselves to self-insight.  Mid-month, some part of our shadow, shunned and shamed (Pluto) all our lives, will demand to be invited into the light of consciousness.

A week or so later, the urge to live with more vitality and authenticity (Uranus) reasserts itself with a vengeance.

We cannot look away.

Gone Literal

Orbiting between Uranus and Pluto is another outer planet, Neptune. It too has a milestone this month: it goes retrograde June 9^th and will stay that way until November 15^th.

Neptune’s retrograde cycles gets a lot less press than Mercury’s, though it is far more profound. This may be because the more powerful a planetary archetype is, the subtler its lessons and the harder it is to translate its workings into a few lines for the blog.

In an effort to explain things quickly and simply, we astro writers often default to the terms of mundane astrology. In the case of Neptune these include flooding, leaking, gases and poisons. This is valid as far as it goes. But if we use astrology primarily for psycho-spiritual growth, by the time a transit has gone literal, it’s gone wrong.

What I mean is, we ideally want to understand the meaning of a transit before it comes at us in its most blatant form.²

Gone Somatic

We see this principle at work in psychic conditions that go somatic. When we’re tired and rundown, ideally we’d put ourselves to bed before we get to the point of falling down sick.

By the same token, we’d be better off realizing that we feel like we’re drowning (in emotion, in information, in life itself) than we’d be if we risked literally drowning, in water. But the Cosmos will do whatever it takes to get its point across.

This is not to say that physical illness is inevitably a sign of insufficient awareness, nor that physical drowning and flooding are likely occurrences with Neptune transits. You’d think they were, though, given the way pop astrology emphasizes the literal.³

Altered States

To understand Neptune retrograde, consider the meaning of retrogradation in general. The weeks or months during which a planet is retrograde are meant to take us back over the function of the planet in question. We go back over old ground in that arena, and reassess our approach, so we can know what to tweak.

With Neptune, this review is taking place in our sleep, figuratively or literally. Maybe we’re trying to reach a deeper understanding of sleep itself, or of our fantasy life, or of that netherworld we go to between sleeping and waking.

Neptune’s explorations resist clear analysis or even identification. They particularly resist value judgment. Our excursions into non-ordinary states of consciousness may be indirect, inadvertent or ill-advised, as with substance abuse.

From the point of view of the chart as a whole, of course we want to try for the healthier expressions of any transit. But from the point of view of Neptune itself, such discernment is neither here nor there. Neptune doesn’t care whether or not we know what we’re doing.

Gone Fishing

For artists, these months could mean a return to a source of inspiration. Dive into that deep internal pool of imagery where your next painting or screenplay exists in an aboriginal state. There’s a kind of marine archeology going on here. Whether you’re a historian working on a theory about an ancient henge, or a psychic investigator pondering past lives, you’re in  mysterious territory. With Neptune retrograde, we’re all trawling in the collective unconscious.⁴

Some people will mistrust a transit like this expressly because it resists   facile understanding. Their logic seems to be: It’s confusing so I don’t like it, and because I don’t like it, I’ll dismiss it. Anything unknowable by my cognitive functioning is not worth my time.

This attitude gets in the way if we want to understand the image-making capacity of our minds. But it’s not only foolish from a personal point of view. From a collective point of view, Neptune Denial may spell nothing less than the demise of the human race, as Chris Hedge points out in his recent essay on the necessity of imagination.

Let us set the intention on June 9^th to approach the oceanic mind with curiosity — as happens in lucid dreaming, and in the very best talk therapy — and with good faith. The faith we’re cultivating here is that something important and vital resides in the underwater caverns beneath the unconscious mind.

Inner Ocean

Where is Neptune in your natal chart? Where is it passing by transit? Knowing these placements will help you understand where your mystical curiosity is taking you. This is the time to let your curiosity unfurl with vast, sweeping, universal questions.

If we are shut down to our inner knowing, Neptune transits can manifest as a sense of passivity and lifelessness, as if we were being swept away in a sea of meaninglessness. By contrast, when driven by mystical curiosity we billow and bloom like a jellyfish in the depths. We let the transit take us to those places in the mind where creativity is born.

Notes

1 Mercury goes retrograde a few times each year, and always occasions a disproportionate amount of astrological writing. And blaming. As transits go, this one seems to have become astrology’s favorite whipping-boy.

2 Underlying occult thinking is the idea that the archetype of a thing — its unformed meaning cluster — predates the thing itself. The premise here is that everything is energy, and energy exists without form before it becomes an event. A book, for instance, is an idea before it’s an actual book. And even before it’s an idea, it’s an energy pattern — an archetype — buzzed up with meaning.

3 Literal pictures are easier to talk about than states of mind and emotional conditions. They give us an immediate image that sticks in the mind (especially when spiked by fear, as in “OMG, my horoscope says I might drown”). This is why the Goddess created metaphors.

4 When a person is working on an archetypal lesson, its themes may show up in a dream. When a whole collective is working on it, it may show up as a myth. Such as that of a great flood, a universal story that recurs throughout history, every time humanity has need of it. Right now, we can see the mass mind struggling with the idea of an all-but-total wipe-out/ breakdown of life on Earth, along the lines of Noah and the arc. No surprise that a blockbuster movie about this story came out during the blockbuster transits of April. I have been proposing since 2009 that the great flood is the story of our era.