Our Drowning Time
What goes under must reemerge—in fiery flames.
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“Neptune’s realm is always a hall of mirrors. The communist, driven by a utopian dream of a perfect world, is locked in mutual hatred with the fascist who is driven by an equally utopian dream of an equally perfect world.” —Liz Greene
PLANETS HAVE BIRTHDAYS. Well, at least the outer planets—Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—do. To the amazement of the novice, there is an eerie synchronic link between historical events and the discovery of a new planet.
Students of astrology are familiar with these tales when inquiring into the naming and nature of what’s often called the ‘transpersonal’ trio. I still struggle with the notion, but I must admit that something mysterious and supernatural was at play during these planetary christenings.
It’s as if each planet appeared and was cataloged as human evolution reached a state where it could embody their influence—ways of thinking and feeling that were untried and often transcendent.
Uranus’s discovery coincided with the American and French Revolutions, and so, boom, it became the emblem of democracy. Neptune materialized as Marxism gained traction. This ideology became a bookend to Uranus’.
Pluto’s discovery coincided with a hybrid of the Uranus and Neptune credos, where the principles associated with both planets morphed into the rising mania for fascism.
As the Liz Greene quote that opens this post points out, Neptune has no loyalty other than to its ‘hall of mirrors’ effect.
What’s fascinating about Neptune’s discovery is that on that September evening in 1846, the planet was in an exact conjunction with Saturn in Aquarius. In a way, this merged the two planets in our collective imagination.
This also alludes to the intense cultural metamorphosis we can expect when the two planets are in the same sign on their way to a new conjunction. And we are presently living through such a transit (and pre-conjunction condition).
Both planets will move out of the sign Pisces this year—heading toward the foremost demarcation point in the Zodiac—zero degrees Aries.
In a way, this approach is akin to cellular mitosis. As is typical with mitosis, there is an exaggerated perturbation at play right before the cell divides—an attempt to maintain integrity and surrender to the demand for division.
Thus, these pre-approach moments can feel unbearable. For us humans, it’s like sleeping in a bed where the sword of Damocles is swaying directly over our heads.
The contradictions—the jumble of facts (Saturn) and fraud (Neptune), commitment (Saturn) and denial (Neptune), reality (Saturn), and delusion (Neptune) are psychospiritually excruciating.
In the US, we’re seeing this play out with a sudden dismantling of the nation’s Constitution. The law of the land—that defines our consensus reality—is being eroded (Neptune) by authoritarian (Saturn) dispatches from the Trump administration and its oligarchical representative, the ketamine-addled (possibly illegal) immigrant Elon Musk.
But it’s critical to remember that the US’s current political dystopia follows Pluto’s long transit through Capricorn. As Chris Hedges noted in a speech recently:
“Donald Trump does not herald the collapse of democracy. He heralds the ripping away of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease.
Hedges then lists a litany of woes that had taken root long before MAGA congealed—namely, deindustrialization, deregulation, predatory corporations, the surveillance state, and a massive prison population (the largest in the world)—all of these generate, in each of us, feelings of betrayal, stagnation, and despair that culminate in a “justified hatred of the ruling class.”
These conditions took years to accrue but were finally put into high relief during the Pluto in Capricorn transit and its American hallmark—the United States’ Pluto return.
This is vital to consider should you find yourself infuriated by the lack of pushback or pro-activism from the Democratic party. But this is a moot complaint as we are officially in a post-fallout state, where those with the means (aka the oligarchs) are on a crusade to gnaw away the resources that remain on the United States’s carcass.
There is no Democratic party in place at this moment. There is no Republican party either. Within the matrix that defines Saturn-Neptune in Pisces logic, those coalitions are mirages, or as Hedges calls them, a ‘veneer.’
We’re ‘located’ now within the miasmic blob of a kakistocracy (government by the least suitable citizens of a state) that has merged with a kleptocracy (government by those who seek personal gain at the expense of the governed).
A hallucinatory disorientation worthy of a Margaret Atwood novel. One wonders how in the fuck the narrative will end.