Neptune's Underworld and Neptune's Madness

I’ve felt haunted all my life. It’s becoming clear that there’s this guy in the unlit back room of the house who doesn’t want me to live, not my way. He wants me to live, if you can call it that, his way. He sees what I do as worthless, not the real thing, not what EVERYBODY ELSE does. Of course, he is also me. I spoke for him a few weeks ago, and it was fierce, it was like that moment in Alien where the predator bursts out of the guy’s stomach. Gotcha at last!

 

It’s been a long time coming. 35 years or so. For 10 years in my 20s and early 30s I lived him out, though I thought I was doing the opposite. Then Pluto got to work for 13 years. He finished in about 2004, and since then Neptune has been at work.

To be specific, over about 12 years Pluto hard-aspected my Sun-Pluto, MC, Asc and Moon respectively. All the important bits. And one of his main functions was to break down my Will. It took a long time. I’d keep standing up again and trying to ‘achieve’ things, and I did do some good stuff, but in the end he’d knock me down again. He’d abduct me to his Underworld, defeated, and demolish some more of my foundations.

At the end of this period I’d started doing astrology readings and then writing astrology. Neptune was moving towards my Sun, and Pluto had prepared the ground for something to flow through me, sufficiently unimpeded by weird notions of ‘achievement’.

So I have spent the last 7 or 8 years in a Neptune period, and there are some years yet to run. He will hard-aspect all the points that Pluto hard-aspected. And I have been trying to work out what it is that Neptune transits are about. For Pluto transits we have the myth of the abduction of Persephone to the Underworld by Pluto, she marries him, and from then on spends 6 months of the year in this world and 6 months in the Underworld, summer and winter respectively.

But we don’t really have such a myth for Neptune. And maybe that is appropriate, that we have nothing we can grasp hold of, we are left floundering.

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I think, though, that  a Neptune transit can be just as much of an Underworld as a Pluto transit. In both transits, ordinary life with its goals and drives is to some extent suspended and you are taken somewhere else for transformation, an inner place, and this can go on for years, it becomes your way of life. In the case of Pluto, it is an earthy Underworld where your building blocks are demolished and replaced. With Neptune, it is a watery Underworld where you are gradually washed away and absorbed into the greater consciousness around you.

It is interesting that the 2 crucibles of transformation should be Earth and Water, the still steady containing elements.

With Pluto you are abducted, with Neptune you are shipwrecked and drowned. And then after a while this happens:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

These lines are from The Tempest, and I think they’re a good metaphor for a Neptune transit. With both Pluto and Neptune we are taken apart and rebuilt, but I think they have different flavours. I spent some time trying to work them out psychoanalytically, Pluto does this to you and Neptune does that, but I’m not sure how possible that is.

What happens to us under these transits is essentially a story that has a feel to it. We went somewhere else and we came back different. The fairies took us away. Something out there took our soul away, and our soul is us, and we went to this other place with these people and we can never be the same again because we have seen this other place. It may be the Dark Earth we have tasted. Or we encountered an Angel:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence.

 (Rilke: 1^st Duino Elegy)

Paradoxically, we only belong here, we only incarnate, after we have been taken by Pluto or Neptune, abducted or shipwrecked, and then killed, dead to life as we knew it, and then reborn with that look in our eyes, that inner place we consult.

Goethe:

“And so long as you haven't experienced

this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest

on the dark earth.”

Under my Pluto transits, I was always planning the next thing, doing it for a bit, then being taken apart. By the time it came to the Neptune transits, I was willing to flounder and not know where I was going in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to were it not for Pluto. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. But there has nevertheless been a flow as long as I’m not fighting what’s happening. My blog has flowed over the last 7 years, it has shaped me in a way nothing else ever has (it seems). And I have done it in a Neptunian way, I have written as and when I feel like it.

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes…

Neptune has dissolved me, and in has come coral and pearl from the surrounding oceanic consciousness. An ocean of riches, if you allow Neptune to shipwreck you. And while Pluto kept defeating the guy in the back room, Neptune has dissolved the wall between us so I can now start to see him.

There is also the madness of Neptune transits. With Pluto we are abducted by a god, with Neptune we are possessed by a god (when we’re not being shipwrecked!) With Pluto, elements of the psyche that need to come on board presents themselves as demons. Our job is not to slay them but to learn to live with them. With Neptune, these elements can take us over, we see reality through the eyes of the unlived soul part, and to others’ eyes it can seem like we’ve gone mad, which in a way we have. And the job is to live the main personality and the new bit together, rather than switching between the two. And Neptune, the dissolver of barriers, will do that for you.

That is one of the great things about these 2 planets: there are some big jobs to do, but they will do them for you. We couldn’t possibly know what to do anyway. Our part is to be patient and to stay with whatever’s happening, maybe over years. If big parts of your life don’t work anymore, or if you have no idea where you’re headed, that is probably fine, that is probably as it needs to be, and you just need to stay with it for however many years it lasts.

In 2007, as I was beginning my long encounter with Neptune, I wrote a piece called A Myth for Neptune Transits. And it was the madness aspect of the transits that I focussed on. Below is what I wrote:

I Googled ‘god of illusion’ and the 1st result I got was Dionysus, who Liz Greene promotes as a strongly Piscean figure in her book ‘The Astrology of Fate’. In particular, there is the story of Dionysus and King Pentheus.

Dionysos

As a young man Dionysus had been driven mad by Zeus’ jealous wife Hera. “He went wandering all over the world, accompanied by his tutor… and a company of wild Maenads. He taught the art of the vine to Egypt and India, and then returned to wander around Greece. Eventually he arrived at Thebes, the place of his mother’s birth. There King Pentheus… disliked the god’s dissolute appearance, and arrested him and his shabby train. But Dionysus drove the king mad, and Pentheus found that he had shackled a bull instead of the god. The Maenads escaped and went raging out upon the mountains, where they tore wild animals in pieces. The King attempted to stop them but, inflamed with wine and religious ecstasy, the Maenads, led by the King’s mother, rent him limb from limb and tore off his head. Thus he met the same fate as the god whom he had rejected.” (From The Astrology of Fate)

And from Wikipedia: “The female worshippers of Dionysus were known as Maenads, who often experienced divine ecstasy. Pentheus was slowly driven mad by the compelling Dionysus, and lured to the woods of Mount Cithaeron to see the Maenads. When the women spied Pentheus, they tore him to pieces like they did earlier in the play to a herd of cattle. Brutally, his head was torn off by his mother Agave as he begged for his life.”

We could say that the essence of a Neptune transit is possession by the god. This is different to a Pluto transit, where you could say the essence is abduction by the god, and being brought to his underworld. Apparently this was one of the unusual characteristics of the worship of Dionysus in Roman times, that he was experienced internally i.e. you were possessed.

Pentheus is torn apart by the Maenads

The Maenads themselves are a graphic description of what happens when you surrender to the god, there is this experience of ecstasy as the normal inhibitions and controlling, rational will are no longer present. OK, they also tear animals and even people to pieces, but this is symbolic of the ecstatic freedom of primal consciousness, and the radical dissolution of ordinary, ego consciousness under a Neptune transit: you are torn to pieces, in particular your head is torn off by your mother! You are no longer in control (head), and this allows an experience of a primal, source consciousness (mother), that actually takes care of us (mother), and the transit is about learning to let more of that in to our daily lives. And it’s not like we have a choice. What happened to Pentheus is also a description of what happens when you resist Neptune/Dionysus, when you refuse, like Pentheus, to worship him. You get torn apart by mad women!

So the essence of a Neptune transit is surrender to this god, becoming a ‘walk-in’ if you like! If you oppose him you’ll be torn apart – and this will be the difficult part of the transit, because we all have our sides that want to remain in control. But this is also deeply transformative. And to the extent that we surrender, there is an initiation into his ecstatic realm. There was a long tradition of mystery cults around Dionysus, but very little is known about them. This is appropriate, for his realm is esoteric and beyond words, and people who have been there speak about it guardedly, if at all. Another reason for the secrecy is that this sort of experience/behaviour is felt as deeply threatening by conventional society. Hence the opposition that Dionysus regularly encountered. Hence, perhaps, the official opposition to ‘rave’ culture in the UK.

So the two mythical aspects around Neptune transits that I am picking out here are firstly the Maenads, who through surrender of the ‘civilised’ ego experience the ecstasy and secret knowledge of Dionysus’s realm; and secondly the story of Pentheus, who symbolises the transformation that the resistant, controlling ego undergoes. Dionysus makes you mad, and leads you to a place where you are torn apart. But which is the real madness, Dionysus’ realm, or that of the deluded ego which thinks it is in control?

TRADE SECRETS

I haven’t properly written a blog for about 6 weeks, probably my longest gap in 7 years. Much of it due to being in Canada and USA doing astro readings. Many thanks to all my hosts in Vancouver Island, Vancouver, Shelton, Seattle and Portland. It seems like did that really happen? But I also had a great time. 

I noticed that the latest edition of Mountain Astrologer has a theme of Chart Interpretation - ‘Tips and Techniques from the Pros’ -  guest edited by Frank Clifford. And I thought well how do I interpret a chart? I tend to think there’s nothing particular about the way I do it, but there probably is, and writing this piece is how I’m going to find out. Thinking out loud.

First of all, I’m not systematic. I like to wander round the chart until eventually everything gets covered. Sometimes I’ll say how did we get an hour into the reading without mentioning the ascendant? I don’t think it matters too much where we start, sometimes I’ll go with whatever I first look at. I like to do that occasionally, just to shake things up, maybe start with Mercury or something. I think there’s an important point here, in that the intuition can need this sort of space to function.

In fact, the whole reading and its setting need space. A bit of informality and ease at the start, get it all on an equal basis, like you’re friends, bring yourself in personally, rather than you’re a ‘professional’ that the ‘client’ is coming to see. This is more important than interpretative technique. And flexibility around time – I like to work with a maximum charge and let the reading take as long as it takes. And you are doing a reading for the person who shows up, how they are now, rather than all the issues they have maybe mentioned in advance. More often than not, I’d say, the reading is about something different to what the person coming along thought it was.

The astrologer is a healer, someone who through his or her craft gains insight into what the other person needs, what is really going on, and addresses that. It doesn’t make the astrologer ‘superior’ in any way, because the same applies to ourselves. It is very difficult to see ourselves clearly, and we astrologers need that sort of feedback just as much as anyone.

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And the reading is a dialogue. I’ll start out, however, telling the other person that the less I know about them the better, just for now, and I launch into the chart and hit a few nails on the head

and wow, how could the astrologer have known that? And this is important, it’s not just showmanship, it’s a process of enchantment, the creation of a ritual space in which magic happens, a universe that knows things about you, in many ways knows you better than you know yourself. Wow! The reading itself is a kind of ceremony, an archetypal invocation, and it can be worth travelling hundreds of miles for, the journey itself becomes part of the process.

But after that I need to know about the person so that I can be more specific about what I have to say. Occasionally -  if they are astrologers! - it can feel a bit like they are waiting for me to come out with my ‘take’ on the chart. But I can’t really work that way, not at any rate till well into the reading and after plenty of

dialogue: I’ll be circling round some planets and some issues, coming back to the same place again and again and then suddenly I get it, wow where did that come from, yes I think I’ve got to the heart of it.

And sometimes I can be wandering around a chart saying this and saying that, and it’s largely true, but so what? And at that point I have to trust, because eventually we do always get there, we hit on the issues that need addressing, and at that point I feel the reading is really happening and that I’ll be able to say things that help the other person.

And when I’m doing a reading, I’m always checking – if I need to – that what I’m saying makes sense to the other person in terms of their own experience. Too many people are willing to say that years ago a psychic or a tarot reader or an astrologer told them they’re like this or that, that they maybe have a gift for something, and they hang onto it like it’s a separate piece of knowledge disconnected from what they know about themselves, but which makes them feel good about themselves. And what I aim to do is the OPPOSITE of that. Of course, I also want people to feel good about themselves, we are far too good at feeling bad about ourselves, but I don’t want anyone accepting anything I say unless they know it for themselves. A reading should confirm and add to self-knowledge rather than in any way be a substitute for it. That is where prediction, which has its place, can be a bit tricky, because it can easily be disconnected from where we are now.

Time to wander onto technique for a while. If somebody is not an astrologer – which of course is nearly always the case – then I like them to have at least a vague idea of why I’m saying what I’m saying in terms of the symbols, so if it’s a skype reading then I make sure they have their own copy of the chart and I give them a brief intro as to how it works.

And I hang the chart around the Sun and the Moon. Together they are like a tree that describes the main part of the personality. The Sun is the branches, reaching up towards self-knowledge and self-consciousness. The Moon is the roots, our past, our foundation, our emotions and instincts, our source of basic nourishment. But it’s not a hard and fast distinction: it’s not always easy to tell the difference, for example, between someone with a Sagittarian Moon or Sun. The Sun is the masculine principle, the Moon is the feminine principle, and they need to be given equal weight. You are as much your Moon sign as your Sun sign. The popular emphasis on Sun signs points to a cultural imbalance, an undervaluing of feeling.

With planets in signs, the emphasis is on the ‘inner’, and with planets in Houses (based on the Asc and MC), the emphasis is on ‘outer’, our connection to the world. But it is not an absolute distinction, there is a plenty of overlap. It is ultimately an artificial distinction, which we need to live on the planet, but which is created by our brains. There is, if you like, a unity of Soul behind appearances. The fact that the planets reflect, or even cause, inner events, shows this unity.

And if I go into the Sun and Moon by both Sign and House, and synthesise where I can, then you have a pretty full picture of the person in a basic kind of way. Though quite often I don’t seem to get that far, because there is so much in a chart, and so much going on in a person’s life, that I let the current of the interchange take me to the issues that need addressing, to ensure there is proper time for that, and then I will keep referring back to the planets and how they work for that person when we are trying to sort out whatever it is that needs sorting or clarifying.

I particularly focus on the hard aspects from the Sun and Moon to Saturn and the Outer Planets. These are the main challenges, the main growth points in the chart and in someone's life. You could say that is what they most need to know about. But I’ll also look at the hard angles between the other planets, angles and the outer planets. And particularly so if the only hard aspect is say to Venus, then you know one of the main learning points for that person is probably how they are in relationships.

With Saturn, the emphasis is on the need to master what you do over a long period, to make your mark, your contribution, to be recognised by your peers for what you do, to develop the practical wisdom of experience. And because it is a hard aspect, there is also the downside of Saturn to look out for: never feeling what you do is good enough, self-doubt, unable to stop and be still and value what you are as much as what you do. Using Saturn to build, rather than deny, an inner life. That’s a big one in our culture.

With Uranus, creativity – or the spark of life - is the keyword. That is why there is often an apparently misfit or unconventional nature. But as long as you are creative, in the sense of new ideas and ways of being that aren’t just re-arrangements of the old, and you don’t settle down, you’ll do OK. The trouble comes when you want to be like everyone else and play safe. That is when Uranus gets disruptive and even destructive.

With Neptune, Imagination is the keyword. Neptune reminds us that the world isn’t divided up like we think into self and other, inner and outer etc. Neptune presents the world to us like that, but also takes us to what is behind appearances. We are connected to each other and everything and with Neptune we need to feel that as part of our everyday experience. It is very much a feeling thing. If we shut that out and keep our reality in boxes, then we will look for that feeling in other ways – addiction, madness, fantasy. With Neptune, you lose contact with reality unless you include non-ordinary reality in your life. To know who you are, you have to give up trying to define yourself in narrow, box-like ways.

With Pluto, Power is the keyword. The power to live, to keep living and keep unfolding, like life does spontaneously wherever you look. And doing this by being true to yourself, the whole of yourself, not editing yourself into acceptable and unacceptable pieces. Life doesn’t think like that. With Pluto, we need to take Nature as our guide. Pluto is associated with depth psychology and the acceptance of ‘demons’ because of this natural movement of our being towards wholeness. There is a kind of authenticity, a strong presence, a power to

someone who is true to themselves in this way. It is not just demons we need to be true to, or what appear as demons, far from it, it is talents as well, becoming good at something can also be a threat to our sense of who we are. And as the Gospel of St Thomas says, if you bring forth that which is within you to bring forth, it will save you. If you don’t, it will destroy you. Until, that is, you can’t bear it any longer and you square with Pluto!

So that for me is often the focus of a natal chart reading: the various ways in which the outer planets are trying to get in on our lives and make us more than we are, and the ways we resist that.

But almost invariably, the reason someone will want a reading is because they are going through a period of change that is more intense than usual, and they want to make sense of it.

And that comes down to hard outer planet transits. Quite often if you point out that say Neptune is squaring someone’s Sun and they are having a really hard time of it, they will want to know when it’s going to be over, with the unspoken idea of hanging on grimly until that time and then going back to as they were before. In a way, that’s quite natural.

So my job is to show someone how to BE in that transit. For now, their life to a large extent IS that transit and they need to live it.

Saturn transits have a different quality to outer planet transits. Saturn is a planet we can see with the naked eye, he is conscious, we can work with him. With Saturn transits, we need to think about things, clarify them, get things to happen, move things on, work hard. If Saturn is e.g. crossing the top of your chart, then it is time to take your career/vocation to a new stage, a deeper stage, which may or may not mean doing something different, and it may only quantitatively be a small part of your life, but it holds the most meaning for you (remember Saturn is moving from the end of the 9^th into the 10^th), and it is time to put that into the world to a degree that you haven’t previously. It’s about setting practical goals, in a spacious kind of way, so that you can express in the world whatever has meaning for you.

With the 3 outer planets, you don’t have the same control as you do with Saturn. Saturn is about taking charge, taking control of your life, whereas Uranus, Neptune and Pluto require a degree of surrender to a wisdom that knows us better than we do ourselves.

That’s the thing these transits show us, that we may have one idea about our life, but life itself often has another idea. It’s like some blueprint for what we could be that is kicking in, and of which we only have glimpses. The course of our own lives and the way we lose control at times of major change shows us that life is NOT the blind chance that the Darwinists would have us believe, life has its own designs, but understanding those designs is forever beyond us.

So these outer planet transits are highly unpredictable in their outcomes, because they are taking us to places we have not yet experienced. So my job is not to tell you about the port to which your ship is headed – I cannot know that – but how to steer your ship, what type of storm or heavy seas you are encountering. And not to drop anchor and try to sit out the storm, that won’t work. If it is a storm. It may not be, you may just be going from strength to strength, but then you probably wouldn’t have come to see me the astrologer!

And if you’re honest with yourself, you know that the old you, the old way of life no longer feels right, and that you’re not yet ready for the next stage, and that is the way I take the transits from something as it were external, to something you know for yourself.

Relationships are a classic one here. You’ve got a major transit to your Venus and you want to know when it’ll be over because you want a relationship and you’re maybe in your 40s and worried that you’re going to get left on the shelf (Nonsense, people of the same age continue to fancy each other!). Or rather, you think you want a relationship. Because the transit is changing you in that area, and as I say, if the right person walked through the door now, you wouldn’t recognise them, because you are not the you that you will be when the transit is over! And if you are honest, though you may feel lonely right now, you know that you don’t feel ready for a relationship. And usually people seem to agree with this when they stop and think.

With Uranus transits, you need to live with a certain amount of instability. It is not a time for putting down roots or trying to make things last. It is about welcoming in new elements, seeing things in new ways, treat it as an adventure, in which what is new in your life may or may not last. Like all the outer planets transits, it can be quite uncomfortable, unless you are used to having that planet in your life anyway through the natal chart. You can have major parts of your life suddenly taken away from you, and that can be very painful. But even if it seems to come at you from the outside, so to speak, and to have had nothing to do with anything you have done, there is always this mysterious synchronicity between inner and outer, that provides an inner meaning to the unwelcome outer event. And it may be years before you can look back and see the necessity of that disruption in terms of your life moving on, it may just seem pointless and like it has removed all the meaning from your life. But under Uranus, it’s kind of guaranteed that you’ll also be waking up in certain ways, new abilities, new opportunities that weren’t there before coming your way.

Neptune transits often involve learning to trust. Neptune is the planet that shows us that we are looked after, that there is a benign aspect to the universe, and that yes change can be difficult and confusing, but there is some kind of gift, some kind of soulfulness in store for us as we progress through the transit and stop trying to control our lives. I often notice a battle with Saturn here. Saturn is very good at trying to boss Neptune around, and because Neptune isn’t very tangible, it can seem like the right thing to do. Keeping it all together (Saturn) while inwardly you are longing just to give it all up (Neptune) and go where the spirit takes you, but can you trust that? Sensible, right-thinking people say no, just keep it together, you’re doing proper work, earning proper money, you are busy, don’t give in to this weakness! And sometimes with Neptune you can be a bit maddened, you don’t know what is real any more, but as with all the outer planets, a big part of the change is letting yourself be taken over, letting yourself if you like be prompted from deep within and trusting that, going with that. And that can take a lot of courage, but it gives you your soul, and that is perhaps what Neptune is about more than anything, living from the spirit: waking up in the morning and going with its promptings, which aren’t necessarily anything deep and mystical that you have to fish around for, but simply what you are feeling here and now, and if you go with that, then over time it will deepen and become a sure guide.

Pluto and Neptune are probably the 2 deepest transformers. I can’t always tell the difference between them. My own experience of Pluto in the 90s was that the life-force, the ability to get up in the morning and do my day, had been switched off, and it made me realise that it wasn’t mine, I wasn’t calling the shots like I thought I was, and I needed to go about things in a very different way if I wanted that life-force back. I think Pluto brings you back to what is most basic. He takes apart the civilised veneer, and shows you what is really driving you. It is a time when bits of you that have been left out, maybe since childhood, reveal themselves, having of course been there all along but without you knowing it, beyond a sense of something not being quite right, something missing.

So I think the way through a Pluto transit is to be true to yourself, true to whatever is going on, and be prepared to start your life all over again on the new foundation that is slowly slowly being built.

These periods can last for years. There is a crucible of which you are only half aware in which much of you is bubbling away, like a chrysalis which as a horrible child if you ever pulled one apart, you would have seen to be full of green liquid, looking nothing like the butterfly it was eventually to become. And during these periods it can feel like you are treading water with your life, nothing comes of anything new that you try to bring into your life, and you can want to tear your hair out, and like with the other transits, particularly

Neptune, you start to feel inadequate and like a loser because you can’t just get on with life like you’re ‘supposed’ to. You are wandering on the plains of Hades. You are deeply internal, your gaze is directed inwards, and if you can recognise this and value this and be true to whatever you are feeling and not try to put it all into words, then you will be helping instead of hindering the transit.

Part of the problem we have with transits is cultural. In ancient Greece and India, the highest form of activity was contemplation. In ours, the highest form of activity is being busy. If we’re not busy, then we feel bad about ourselves. If we are busy, even if the activity really bores us, we feel a sense of virtue, we are a ‘good’ person.

So you can see why this attitude, which is deeply ingrained, creates a problem with how to be during a major transit, when we are needing to let the old fall apart and remain in a state of uncertainty until the new arises. I think this state of uncertainty and inwardness is good for the soul, it forces us to find a way of valuing ourselves that is not based on being busy.

And because of the way our culture is, getting a take on being ‘busy’ is often a major part of the transformational process, whatever the transit, assuming it’s big enough to kybosh our old way of living.