Time, Sex and Neptune's Cloud of Unknowing
“Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.”
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NEPTUNE’S LONG TRANSIT through Pisces (the planet entered the fish duo’s domain in February of 2012) is overshadowed by the more dramatic deconstructions of Pluto’s move through Capricorn—the last gasps of which we’re living through before the planet permanently enters Aquarius days after the 2024 presidential election. Goddess help us all.
While Pluto drags across the last degrees of Capricorn, there’s been an exaggerated sense that for each step forward, we’re making quantum leaps backward. But in keeping with the notion that the darkest hour is just before — you know — please read astrologer Mary Plumb’s well-rounded delineation on this closing-degree phase: Pluto on the Edge.
The Plutonic destruction of infrastructures, both literal and figurative, is easier to track in a cardinal (action-making) sign like Capricorn. A ‘what you see is what you get’ sort of arrangement.
Meanwhile, Neptune in Pisces is the occluded riddle, wrapped in a mystery that’s buried within an enigma. And this makes the transit’s shape-shifty fallout difficult to discern. And articulate.
As I told a friend last night, when you have a planet specializing in boundary-dissolving placed in a sign whose basic MO is to blur distinctions and synthesize polarities, we end up with a hybrid form of confoundment.
If you’ve ever been deeply confused by an event, you’ll recall that you endured a seemingly designated quota of befuddlement before clarity (disguised as grace) descended. It’s a Neptunian form of initiation. I’m thinking of that cogent line from Hermann Hesse: “Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.”
Presently, two of our most seemingly consistent conditions for defining reality are trapped in a through-the-looking-glass mutation. I consider both directly related to the ongoing Neptune/Pisces transit.
First up is time and how we segment chronology: Past, present, future—simple enough. Well, actually, no. During the current transit, we’re drifting through a mirage. A cul-de-sac of our past—one’s personal past and our collective history.
We do this daily when we trawl about online in what is ostensibly the very pinnacle of ‘nowness’ brought to us by the miracle of technology. (Remember, it was Neptune’s transit through Aquarius that established a technocracy that sold us on the religion of Silicon Valley — an unchallenged cult that has ballooned to world dominance throughout Neptune’s transit in Pisces).
Every day online, we assume we are immersed in the ‘now’—the continual commentary regarding Ukraine and Israel, Donald Trump’s ensuing megalomania, and Joe Biden’s diminishing cognitive skills (and poll numbers) — amidst the endless scroll through our decrepit social media feeds. But all of this content has already happened. It’s in the past and has nothing to do with your present-time reality. As tech gadfly Ryan Broderick points out:
“When everything is commentary, what else is there to comment on, but prior commentary? … We’re not building toward new ideas; we’re relating things that just happened to other things that happened before that.”
And as the Atlantic’s Charles Warzel reiterates: “Online, we are trapped in the recent past. That’s a recipe for feeling powerless.”
This is doubly disturbing when you consider that computers have co-opted your mind’s sovereignty. It’s not surprising that Elon Musk is perfecting cyber gizmos that will be soldered directly into your cranium. And with the internet—where our mind steeps, sometimes for hours a day—we’re already halfway there.