Let's Get Real About Jupiter and Neptune in Pisces

The big conjunction continues to off-gas as I type. And it’s not what you imagine, which is exactly how the folks that militarize reality want to keep it.

Pisces, F. Woodruff, acrylic on canvas. © 2022

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” —George Orwell

EARLIER THIS WEEK, JUPITER AND NEPTUNE formed a conjunction in Pisces. During the last couple of months, volumes of astro-nonsense were compiled. Most of it was awful and corny. One post I encountered read something like, “Now is the time to transform paradigms and plug into the infinite.” Who finds an application for cliched gibberish like this?

I wrote about the conjunction here and tried to offer practical ways of considering it psychologically.

Rearview Mirrors

Something that cracks me up is when astrologers look back in time and try to cross-connect descriptions of historical events to present astrological transits. Like, say, the last time Jupiter and Neptune met in Pisces, in 1856, and some Austrian ruler came into power. And Japan opened its port to the world. And the Victorian era was going full throttle.

This sort of shoehorning isn’t helpful. One of the key tactics of those who can’t formulate fresh ways to consider current events is to declare, “Something like this already happened in the past, and so it’s happening again because, well, Jupiter and Neptune.”

But where were Uranus and Pluto during that phase of history? Or Mars or Saturn, for that matter. Every event in time mirrors a unique arrangement in the sky, and although the planets do seemingly return to similar locales every thousand years or so, they are not the same planets.

Meaning, as living beings (for lack of a better term), the planets evolve. What we associate as Neptune’s function or influence—today—will have transformed into other expressions years from now. Are you the same person you were 30 years ago?

If more astrologers did an empirical analysis as they experienced astrology (and its components), we’d have an art that was ‘living’ rather than comprised of edicts and archetypes trapped in amber.

The Theater of Reality

When I prepare to write about current astrological transits, I pay attention to what the immediate environment is displaying and make those impressions my baseline and guide. If you’re watchful, your habitat constantly flashes revelations. And because those moments are time/space bound (of which astrology is the grand clock), they can be considered relevant. But as of right now, not 1856.

I learned this skill from Arnold Mindell and his 24-hour dreaming approach. (In short, there is no difference between nocturnal and diurnal dreaming; we’re constantly immersed within a dream field, and Mindell’s work teaches you how to pay attention to that field for clues, hints, signs, winks, omens—whatever you want to call particles of prescience).¹

While driving to coffee yesterday, I passed an SUV with two large Ukraine flags attached to the vehicle’s roof, one above each door, flapping wildly in the wind. I usually see similar displays when the Seahawks have a home game in Seattle, and then hundreds of blue and green flags dot the community.

Because I associate sports team mobs with mental illness, I instantly flashed on the all-pervasive and ongoing, US-self-admitted propaganda surrounding the madness of the war in Ukraine.

I’m not declaring that I have a clear understanding of all the facts or the complex history between Russia and Ukraine, but I’m certain the US is doing what all empires do: meddling and undermining to eventually become the overseer of a domain’s fate. To ensure unmitigated access to that country’s natural resources.

Neptunian and Piscean realities involve the unreal, or how the real is twisted and reframed. This can be a benign process. This is how the alchemy of the imagination works. But for those skilled in manufacturing distortion, the imagination can be revamped to promote obscuration and confusion. And when Jupiter—the giant publisher in the sky is involved—lots of misinformation.

Another big Jupiter/Neptune theme (especially as the merger happened in Pisces) relates to grand-scale expressions of compassion and sacrifice. But also the arising of martyrs and tyrants. Oh, and also religious fervor and mania. This planetary duo generates a sort of hyper manic, high octane atmospheric sensitivity. But how that plays out is up for grabs. And we’re certainly seeing this in the international response to the war in Ukraine. It’s like dozens of different versions of reality are struggling to assert the loudest clarion call.

I kept driving. Head scratching. And as I moved further down the road past the SUV, I couldn’t recall ever seeing a similar public exhibition for citizens from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan. But then those folks are brown—so there’s that.

The most salient markers of this conjunction play into that shadow side of the Jupiter (broadcasting, disseminating) and Neptune (fantasy and mirage-making) conjunction: Again, propaganda. And how, similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the neocons have been gifted with a shocked and awed response. An extreme effect to manipulate and finesse to serve martian aims. Collective compassion reworked to shore up greater arms construction and sales.

As culture critic Gary Indiana wrote in Utopia’s Debris, shortly after sundry ‘conspiracies’ were challenged by the media after the 9/11 fires quelled:

“Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among a handful or billionaires whose interests are identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized "free trade" for the wealthy nations, peonage for the third world, Chomsky’s ‘manufacture of consent' via a constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo), reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of “conspiracy cranks” for instance, the idea that successive “preemptive” wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources.”

Check out the Military Brats

My Jupiter-Neptune-Pisces moment: Last month, on my way to Costa Rica, while waiting for the ferry, the guy taking me to the airport pulled out his phone to show me a collection of videos.

I'm usually instantly bored when people show me photos of their vacations or children. But this rewired my kneejerk response. The video featured his nephew firing off round after round of artillery and then giving thumbs-up gestures to the camera.

I asked where the nephew was stationed, and he told me the US army had sent him to Ukraine six months ago. Why? “He’s helping train their boys there.”

Oh—O.K...Who knew? I didn’t.

Glenn Greenwald, now considered a “Russian asset” (along with woke-challenged Matt Taibbi), for continuing to bring attention to punitive online censorship and our wallowing in propagandistic hysteria:

“Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine,” Reuters said on February 26; “Biden announces $800 million in military aid for Ukraine,” announced The New York Times on March 16; on March 30, NBC's headline read: “Ukraine to receive additional $500 million in aid from U.S., Biden announces”; on Tuesday, Reuters announced: “U.S. to announce $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine, officials say." By design, these gigantic numbers have long ago lost any meaning and provoke barely a peep of questioning let alone objection.

Limited Time Offer

More serendipity. As I’m typing this article, an email arrives. Subject line: Neptune Society—Last Chance To Get 2021 Pricing.

Due to overwhelming demand, our 2022 price increase has been postponed until May 1st.

At Neptune Society of Seattle we understand the shock and confusion when the unexpected happens.

That's why our mission is to provide PEACE OF MIND through end-of-life planning, offering families dignified and affordable cremation services.

Jupiter (long journies, overwhelming demand, and inflation). Oceanic disposal (Neptune). And ‘Peace of mind’ intermixed with confusion (Pisces). Who could say no?

I’ve lost track of how many times Jupiter shows up in the moment of death horoscopes. I always associate its transit with escape or expansion beyond the body’s dictates. Also known as ‘dying.’

The Dionysian is no Picnic

As astrologer Liz Greene points out. A better myth fit for Pisces—instead of the Neptunian—would be the Dionysian. And I agree. Pisces is a wicked and writhing mass of contradictions, from the sublime to the depraved. The delicate to the vicious. A place where the imaginal and the world of hard facts blend seamlessly. Where destruction for construction is tethered together like the cord that harnesses both fishes’ tails. A whirlpool of paradoxes.

Think of Piscean Albert Einstein, an unashamed mystic, working as a clerk in a patent office while rearranging the entire world of physics. Or Kemal Atatürk, who in 1915 massacred nearly a million Armenians in the name of ‘progressive reforms.’

Dionysian contradictions are hard to tease apart and painful to maneuver. Better read another opinion piece to figure out what is happening. Thinking for oneself is arduous, there’s too much (Jupiter) confusion (Neptune) to try and blend (Pisces) into a meaningful narrative.

“Plug into the infinite?” as that goofy article heralded. Sure, go ahead, if you consider the ‘infinite’ the hallway of mirrors that have captivated most Western culture—from the invention of the cinema, television, computer screens, and now mobile phones that tether us to a non-stop flow of infoglut.

This morning at coffee, as I sat in the cafe writing this piece, there was a handful of what Vashon considers its ‘old-timers,’ guys in their 70s and 80s sitting in a corner, lost in deep convo and debate. About what, I’m not sure. But everywhere else around me were folks my age and younger poking and staring into their phones. It’s like that observation from tech critic Sherry Turkle:

“This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now. We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.”

So this might be the upside of the Jupiter Neptune conjunction in Pisces (a sign that needs solitude and time away from the whirling static of ‘group mind’ to center itself). To settle, contemplate and see what the omnipresent dream field is transmitting directly, privately.

While talking with a friend yesterday about the situation in Ukraine, he said, “Jesus fuck. What can anyone do about it?” And I said, “Just starting to question, to disrupt the party line—regardless of one’s political loyalties—is a start.”

Everything begins with a new question. Which is another way of preparing the way for Neptune’s ingress into Aries in 2025, the start of a brand new stage set for reality to unfurl its wares.

Love,

Addendums: Astrologer and author Jessica Murray and I unwittingly published our latest articles simultaneously—damn! Otherwise, I’d have tagged my emailed version with a link to her must-read close read on this conjunction.

Further eviscerations: Plow through the weeds with Aaron Mate’s Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's historic mandate for peace.

Opening painting, Pisces, by Frederick Woodruff, © 2022

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1. Mindell’s entire thesis is a Jupiter-Neptune-Pisces sort of arrangement. One of the more creative expressions of this merger. Consider learning more about him.