Some Origins of Modern Neptune

Descriptions of any planet—ancient or modern—are attempts to describe something metaphysical in nature that is fundamentally irreducible and ineffable, something that exceeds its symbolic approximation. The question is whether the words we’re using are getting us closer to that core undulating mystery, or if they are the product of human assumptions or ideology that in fact muddle and obscure the deeper thing. If we don’t take a clear look at where the language comes from, we’re more susceptible to delusion and diversion (more open to the befuddling effects of Neptune) than if we consciously consider the source and accept or reject certain facets of the archetype according to our own research, experience, and intuition. 

With the ancient planets it’s almost impossibly challenging to trace their overdetermined origins, but with the modern planets it’s a more realistic possibility. At this moment of conjunction between Saturn and Neptune at 0 degrees of Aries, I find myself embracing the immensely Saturnian nature of my natal chart in order to take a critical look at the origins of our astrological understanding of Neptune. My intent is to trace the formation of Neptune as it's now understood, not to undercut the accuracy of the archetype, but to help us understand how it was constructed and by whom so that we can be more thoughtful and precise when we’re drawing conclusions about the planet and its effects. 

Before we go back to neonatal Neptune, let’s get a glimpse of how he/she/it is understood today. Richard Tarnas’ profile in Cosmos and Psyche provides a compelling baseline for the archetype: 

“Neptune is associated with the transcendent, spiritual, ideal, symbolic, and imaginative dimensions of life; with the subtle, formless, intangible, and invisible; with the unitive, timeless, immaterial, and infinite; with all that which transcends the limited literal temporal and material world of concretely empirical reality: myth and religion, art and inspiration, ideals and aspirations, images and reflections, symbols and metaphors, dreams and visions, mysticism, religious devotion, universal compassion. It is associated with the impulse to surrender separative existence and egoic control, to dissolve boundaries and structures in favor of underlying unities and undifferentiated wholes, merging that which was separate, healing and wholeness; the dissolution of ego boundaries and reality structures, states of psychological fusion and intimations of intrauterine existence, melted ecstasy, mystical union, and primary narcissism; with tendencies towards illusion and delusion, deception and self-deception, escapism, intoxication, psychosis, perceptual and cognitive distortions, conflation and confusion, projection, fantasy; with the bedazzlement of consciousness whether by gods, archetypes, beliefs, dreams, ideals, or ideologies; with enchantment, in both positive and negative senses.” (96)

Obviously there's something quixotic about trying to define the archetype of indefinability, like pinning gelatin to a cork board. But the ancient Greek god Neptune isn’t the source of this effluvium, and the channels of transmission are more concrete than you might think. 

It seems that ultimately every generation relates their sense of a contemporary cultural 

zeitgeist to some planetary body, and through this process of association and meaning-making, that celestial body becomes useful for tracking the unique spirit of that moment as it warps, grows, and evolves with time. For thousands of years, the same 7 planets were given new correspondences based on their core characteristics, but we’ve recently started to assign them to newly discovered planets like Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. 

Neptune was discovered September 23rd, 1846, but the first published attempt to discuss the astrological meaning of Neptune that I could find is the 1890 edition of W. J. Simmonite’s Complete Arcana of Astral Philosophy edited by John Story. Story mentions Neptune in his introduction and adds a letter by astrologer John Ackroyd as an addendum at the end of Simmonite’s work. Story himself ties Neptune’s influence to anticolonial radicalism in a way that we are more inclined now to connect to Uranus, explaining that Neptune had been transiting Taurus, the sign that is said to rule Ireland, and enjoining the reader to “Remember Dublin, May 6th, 1882.” When I went to look up what happened on that day, I was surprised to learn about an event called the Phoenix Park Murders, in which the newly appointed British lord of Ireland was assassinated by Irish separatists. While Story may have been stretching the meaning of Neptune to reflect what he saw as the political zeitgeist of his moment in time, it’s notable that this nod to radicalism is one of the first published attempts to theorize the effect of the planet on the political sphere. 

One of the first texts I could find that delineated Neptune through the signs was Alan Leo’s 1901 book Astrology for All. Reading that text alongside his 1912 book The Art of Synthesis, I get the sense that Leo more or less condensed two influential 19th & 20th century cultural movements—Theosophy and Spiritualism—and infused the sign Pisces with their core qualities. From there he transferred all of those same qualities onto the planet Neptune. 

“[Pisces] are nearly all more or less drawn to spiritualism, or the investigation of the unseen. If it be true that they come under the planet Neptune, which is supposed to govern Pisces to a considerable extent, then it is not to be wondered at that the sign is difficult to express.” (Astrology for All, 47) Leo tends to make grand sweeping statements with no justification or explanation of how he came to that conclusion. When he’s defining Pisces in The Art of Synthesis he says (with no source or reasoning) that “there are more mediums born in this sign than in all the others put together.” This is a pretty odd thing to say since it's hard to find any well-known medium or psychic of Leo’s time with this sun sign aside from Edgar Cayce (the sleeping prophet) who fits the type extremely well, but hardly justifies Leo’s universal claim. 

Based on the tenuous connection between Pisces and Neptune (and the tenuous connection between Pisces and mediums), Alan Leo transfers many of the qualities of the sign onto the newly discovered planet, so that most of his delineations of Neptune in the signs relate to mediumship or psychic experiences. It’s also clear that some of the Venusian qualities of Pisces (drawn from Venus’ exaltation in Pisces) inform Leo’s delineation of Neptune in certain signs indicating an interest in aesthetics or poetry. He also comments on Neptune’s capacity to amplify emotion, which makes sense with the qualities we assign to the element of water, and Neptune as the ancient god of water. The planet that was already tied to these watery qualities is of course the moon, so Neptune appears as a kind of hybrid Jupiter-Venus-Moon. 

His Neptune delineations vary very little from sign to sign. Of Aries he writes, “the native has mystical experiences or beliefs,” while Cancer “bestows either mediumship or some psychical faculty.” For those with Neptune in Sagittarius, “there is considerable religious, mystical, or poetical feeling,” and Neptune in Capricorn is “favourable for art, music, etc, and for occupations bordering on the psychical.” Strangely, he doesn’t assign psychic tendencies to Neptune in Pisces. 

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me when authors transfer the traditional meaning and correspondences of a zodiac sign onto a newly discovered planet; the association of all the things ruled by Pisces with one another may feel wise and poignant, like ancient wisdom, because it is; planets that pass through that sign draw out this deep, interconnected complex of meanings. However, I’m less convinced that these zodiacal sign based qualities can be directly transferred to a planet when it’s not in the sign of Pisces. 

Jupiter is the ruler of Pisces. Every planet has a solar and lunar (or masculine and feminine) expression of itself in the form of two signs (except the sun and the moon, which are the quintessential solar/lunar principle and rule only one sign each). Sagittarius is the solar realm of Jupiter and Pisces the lunar Jupiter. Sag is the priest and sage, Pisces the priestess and the mystic. Why then would we graft half of this archetypal energy onto an extremely slow moving planet that we only have 100 years of observation and theory to help us understand and define? 

Simply put, it’s important that we don’t mislead ourselves into thinking that events and qualities which we know are really feminine Jupiter qualities will be prominent whenever there is a Neptune transit or an important Neptune placement in the natal chart. Let’s hold ourselves to a higher standard of precision and ask what the uniquely Neptunian part of whatever event or personality trait we’re discussing really is. This is why I’m skeptical of overly-positive interpretations of Neptune which, unlike Jupiter, is not inherently a benefic planet. 

There have been mystics and mystical traditions for much, much, much longer than Neptune has existed as a planet, so I would hesitate to assign these ancient practices and experiences to Neptune primarily. I feel like it would be more useful to research Theosophy and Spiritualism, and the beliefs, techniques, practices that arose specifically within that milieu. None of this should be taken as a reason to throw out our entire interpretive framework for Neptune. Instead, the messiness of its definition can be seen as a kind of demonstration of the planet's disorienting effects. It seems to me that Neptune’s heart lies in the slippery boundary between illusion or simulation and real connection to the metaphysical or divine. 

Both Theosophy and Spiritualism correlate very closely with the discovery of Neptune and its astrological definition. The Theosophical Society was formed by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in 1875. Spiritualism is even more closely coincident, especially if we tie the movement to the supernatural events at the home of the Fox sisters, as Athur Conan Doyle (glibly) does in his History of Spiritualism Vol 1: “It is impossible to give any date for the early appearances of external intelligent power of a higher or lower type impinging upon the affairs of men. Spiritualists are in the habit of taking March 31, 1848, as the beginning of all psychic things, because their own movement dates from that day.” This is only two years after Neptune was discovered. 

Alan Leo was a devout Theosophist and it seems pretty clear that he wanted there to be a planet that embodied his worldview and took Neptune as that planet. Since Leo died over a decade before Pluto was discovered, Neptune was the only planet that Leo was really able to shape and define within his “evolutionary” project. 

Theosophy is in many ways an orientalist appropriation of Asian and North African religious ideas combined with European esotericism. We could even say that our modern interpretation of Neptune—the dissolver of boundaries—is an expression of Theosophy itself, which dissolved the clear boundaries between cultures and religious traditions into a metaphysical slurry. In this way Theosophy describes well the distortions that occur when we’re intoxicated by Neptune and can no longer distinguish between one thing and another. 

The mystical experience of unity that comes from the collapse of boundaries can be liberating and ego-dissolving; the same effect can of course be instrumentalized to obscure underlying structures of power. The adoption of the concept of Karma is a clear example of this, in which Brahminical casteism was imported into Theosophy by Blavatsky and others, seemingly with no awareness of how it functions historically as a social tool to blame oppressed people for their own suffering. The harmful ideology of karma persists in astrology today (thanks in part to its reinscription by leaders in the New Age movement, who were adopting casteism indirectly through Theosophy and directly from Brahmin priests). This isn’t a paper on the problematics of Theosophy [but here is one] or I would need to go more deeply into the race obsession at the foundation of the movement, which asserted the superiority of “Aryan” culture—the most “evolved” race that would precede the emergence of a new spiritual race represented by the Theosophists. Modern uses of the word “evolutionary” in conjunction with astrology reek of this earlier race theory and should be met with a healthy dose of suspicion.

By highlighting the centrality of Alan Leo’s skewed perspective to the birth of the modern Neptune archetype, I don’t mean to imply that the meaning of Neptune was “made up” whole-cloth by a couple of powerful (problematic) figures. Leo and others who followed him were simultaneously tapping into some profound underlying influence that likely touches on meaningful metaphysical foundations, and at the same time they were projecting their own desires for a planet to represent or stand in for topics and themes that were central to their own work and their respective ideologies.  

Even as we recognize the very human motivations for a particular astrologer to see a planetary archetype through their own philosophical lens, we can look for the glimmer of the ineffable god-thing between their words. In fact, it’s easier to recognize the divinity once we’ve filtered out obvious human machinations. The divine can’t be stared at directly; you have to catch it in the peripheral blur of your vision, in the warp of a reflection, the bruised muddle of twilight. It’s why the astrological houses that can’t see the light of the ascendent are called metakosmios—between worlds—and why those are the ancient houses of divination, mysticism, and the spiritual. 

A little later in the 20th century, Dane Rudhyar writes with compelling depth about Neptune as an archetype of hybridity and liminality. He focuses on its transpersonal function and value in a way that reflects his larger philosophy and astrological project, going beyond Leo's vague projections. I want to quote him at length, particularly because of the way he articulates the Saturn and Neptune dialectic: 

“Neptune represents the end of the journey. It is the merging of the river into the sea, of the individual into the collective, of the one into the All. It is indeed the passage to nirvana, the final state from which there is no return as an individual personality. Thus the song of Neptune is the song of the sea, and the mauve glamor of sunset. It is the music of "Tristan and Ysolde" — its chromaticism, in which merge and are lost all tonalities, all cultural and traditional forms; its ecstatic surge toward annihilation and love; a love beyond name which is death, because absolute completion — or the illusion of completion…

But Neptune is not only an end. It is not only the acid that dissolves all walls and partitions built by Saturn at the dawn of individualized life, the glamor that covers up all defined and clear-cut outlines with a golden and iridescent mist, the lure of freedom which makes one forget duty and roots, caution and morality for the sake of coruscating mirages. It is not only the death of the individual stream into the collective sea, that disappearance of the earth-cultured and soil-loving peasant into the vast metropolitan mob of office and factory workers.

It is also the prenatal stage of a new life: a life at a new level of consciousness, a life which partakes in a more universal rhythm, which knows itself as participant in an order of being far transcending the earth-horizons of a narrow instinctual selfhood.” (New Mansions for New Men)

There’s one more 19th century spiritual movement that I think found its way into the modern Neptune, and that’s American Transcendentilism; it's referenced directly by Tarnas, and feels at least indirectly influential on Leo and Rudhyar’s descriptions of the planet. The philosophy of American Transcendentalism was articulated by writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. It’s described as a “an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.” The movement actually has some common roots with astrology in that they were both influenced by neoplatonism. Older European forms of transcendentalism, like the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant, and Romanticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped shape the American movement, and some proto-Transcendentalist mystics like Emanuel Swedenborg inspired both the New England Transcendentalists and the Spiritualist movement that Alan Leo is obviously referencing in his delineations. 

The Transcendental philosopher and feminist Margaret Fuller writes in her journals about an early mystical experience that expresses poignantly both the spirit of the philosophical movement and the character of Neptune:

“I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it MUST do it—that it must make all this false true—and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self, that selfishness was all folly, and the results of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena.”

Fuller’s mystical experiences and dedication to transcendence were inextricable from her relentless pursuit of equal rights for women in the early 19th century. In our contemporary moment, gripped by the hegemony of rational materialism, we have a tendency to forget that the transcendent has often been the grounds for radical, political liberation. By splitting Neptune from the political radicalism that was hinted at in the first published accounts of the planet in 1890, we may be missing a profound facet of its meaning and astrological effect. Who knows—maybe John Story’s belief in Neptune’s political radicalism holds true afterall, and transcendence has a profound part to play in the global fight for emancipation from colonial regimes. 

Finally, I want to say that this blog post is just a sketch of my initial research and impressions, but I hope to eventually do a more full genealogy of Neptune (and the other two modern planets). I use the word genealogy in the sense of Foucault’s approach to the emergence of cultural phenomenon—not as hierarchical, top-down inventions, but multivalent formations that take shape through dynamic relations of power. While here I focus mostly on a couple of major figures who are responsible for stabilizing our modern image of Neptune, I want to emphasize how much messier and more decentralized the process of cultural formation is in reality. 

After writing this and coming back to it, I feel like I’ve leaned a little too hard into Saturn’s dry criticality, so let me end with a short & random list of things that I think could easily belong to the planet Neptune that aren’t already in the dictionary of astrological correspondences: 

Ectoplasm, Kirlian photography (gotta give this to Mercury and Uranus too I think), ketamine, Pegasus (one of Neptune’s children in ancient Greek myth!), virtual reality, augmented reality, cyberspace, digital filters, synthesizers, hot air balloons, bubble gum (along with Venus), cryogenic freezing (along with Saturn), genetic modification, sensory deprivation chambers, theme parks, vaporwave!

Collage by Joey Cannizzaro with an image from the original 1977 cover of Mind of My Mind by Octavio Butler