The Neptune Return in 2009 – Part I

Between April and July 2009, Neptune will twice cross the degree of its initial discovery at 25 degrees Aquarius – this is its first return to this degree since September 1846. Neptune will have finally encompassed the entire zodiac and as we approach this moment in the near future we can look back and perhaps grasp the meaning of Neptune with a sense of completeness that we have heretofore lacked. When Neptune was discovered, it was closely conjunct Saturn, almost as though its recondite and vague nature required the disciplined measurement and definition of Saturn to bring it to human awareness. How interesting, then, that at the time of its first return since then, it is closely conjoined by Jupiter and Chiron. What can we deduce from this symbolism and how can we apply this to current and future events in the world?

Let us first say something about Neptune’s discovery. This has been described in detail elsewhere and will not be repeated in detail. Suffice to say that it seems to have been discovered independently by a number of different astronomers in Europe who subsequently entered a dispute about who should be seen as the original true discoverer. Even at its very birth into collective awareness, this planetary archetype was steeped in confusion and a deceptive fog that seemed to erode the scientific objectivity of the protagonists.

The events that coincided or immediately followed the discovery of Neptune have been well-documented. The first general anaesthetic, ether, was discovered in the same year, and Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto was published 2 years later. The romantic movement in art and literature was at its peak, and within 10-20 years the spiritualist and theosophical movements were on the rise throughout the world.

With Neptune conjoining Jupiter and Chiron in April and May 2009, we have a chance to re-evaluate the meaning behind this mystery planet. When it was conjunct Saturn, we discovered how to dissolve the pain and material barriers of reality; conjunct Jupiter and Chiron perhaps we see ourselves dissolving our sense of progress, of hope, of opportunity. We are arriving at a time when we will be forced to transcend the ideology of endless growth, of expansion of wealth, of capitalist exploitation of resources, and we will be confronted with the unreality of prevailing ideas of progress. This will hurt, and we will feel deceived. We may feel quite angry and perhaps caught up in something that we didn’t really ever fully buy into, but which has recoiled into our faces. Neptune tells us how we are deceived, fooled into believing something that is false, because deep down we would rather the comforting allure of promised bliss than the depressing reality of pain and suffering. Casting our eyes back one whole Neptune cycle, we can see how ideology and dreams of utopia have dominated the major cultural, economic and geopolitical shifts of the past 165 years. And with Neptune having been discovered in Aquarius, the sign most associated with radical ideas for group evolution, it is not all that surprising how the main ideological current dating from the time of its discovery has been socialism and its more extreme form, communism (as well as political movements that have defined themselves as the antitheses of these ideologies). On a deeper level, then, I feel we are witnessing a collective sense of shame or regret over how easily we have allowed ourselves to be fooled yet again by unrealistic and unsustainable ideas about how we relate to each other economically and politically. There is a sense of ‘how did it come to this?’ or ‘how have we been so stupid to allow things to get this bad?’ But this is Neptune’s blessing: by being deceived we see how we can be so deceptive ourselves, we see how blindly we wish to place our faith in ideologies and abrogate responsibility for ever-vigilant awareness of the moral value within our relationships.

I think concepts of wealth and progress and opportunity and broadening of horizons will come to resemble a painfully distant fantastical dream, a paradise lost, a guilt-ridden hangover of global proportions, and this will by implication become a fertile time for the emergence of cultic figures who promise deliverance and redemption for our sins. Neptune has only just completed its first cycle and we have now found ourselves questioning the truth behind much of what we trusted as real: the democratic process, the meritocracy of a capitalist market economy, the unending progress of scientific rationalism and technological solutions. When it really comes down to brass tacks, where have these bastions of Aquarian egalitarianism and freedom of intellectual endeavour really taken us? Are we really more free now than before? Does our vote really matter any more? Is it not apparent that we are governed more than ever by an arrogant and spiritually ignorant elite that perpetuates its own privilege at the expense of the collective? At the expense of future generations? Aquarius is supposed to champion consideration of the views of all, irrespective of their popularity, yet today we see more homogeneity in political views than has ever existed in modern times. Everyone seems to have come to a consensus about the most important and fundamental questions of political justice: allocation of resources, relations between labour and capital, the role of religious belief in cultural life and its trumping by a disenchanted amoral scientism founded on human meaninglessness. Which is strange, because this is not characteristic of fecund political activity and debate; this resembles a zombified, comatose population who do not believe in anything at all, and who are thereby neutered of political power and freedom of choice. How can there exist freedom of choice when there are no alternatives from which to choose?

We astrologers associate hopes and ideals with the eleventh house and perhaps by extension, with Aquarius. We have heard a lot about hope in recent years, so much so that it has become a meme in itself, a political slogan, a catch-all term to sum up the promise of deliverance by one man, from the iniquitous pit of political criminality into which our world has descended. Hope has, I think, been ‘Neptunized’ – it has been glamourized, rendered numinous and holy, a sacred virtue of the true believer. In the real world, the world of shortages, lay-offs and corporate crime of staggering proportions, of Anglo-American-Israeli genocide in South-West Asia, of ecological crisis and rapidly declining resources, we do not need hope, we need action. To merely hope is to await those who will act to take action, yet presuming that we are incapable of our own action. To merely hope is to wilfully accept our own political paralysis, to deny our own responsibility to set things right starting with our own spheres of influence. Hope as fashionably utilized in recent political discourse is a palliative, a temporary soporific that saps us of our mettle and our courage to fight for justice. We know from experience how Neptune is not satisfied with mere concrete reality; how much more interesting to invest our own ideals of justice and moral rectitude in people who we can then tear apart with Dionysian fervour when they fail to deliver us the Promised Land.

Neptune, discovered with Saturn in conjunction, needs us to take responsibility for our own dreams, our own escapist pursuits, our own spiritual development, and our own addictions. We all have them, but we must learn to keep them from becoming too loose, too readily mixed up and confused with those of others. Above all, we need to stop returning to childhood fantasies of the perfect parent who just ‘knows’ what we need and will deliver us from our pain. Because he won’t. Because he can’t. Because this pain is as necessary as it is inevitable. It is the pain of spiritual, not material, growth.

© Agent 37