ChironNeptunePISCES

Chiron and Neptune were conjunct in the sign of Aquarius, in February 2010, and remained in orb from 2007 – 2014. During 2010-2011, they both moved into the sign of Pisces. Chiron stays there until 2019, and Neptune until 2026; this Piscean emphasis forms one of the ‘defining signatures’ of the times we are living through. The last transit of Chiron through Pisces occurred from 1960-1969, so 'echoes' of this time may be seen in world events and cultural themes.

While there are transits with a more dramatic and obvious presentation occurring over the next few years (such as Uranus going into Aries, and squaring Pluto in Capricorn) the subtle and heartful tones of Chiron and Neptune in Pisces will be heard clearly by those willing to listen. Stories, events, surprises, subtle impressions which carry this energy are already abounding. Some are disturbing, some soothing .....

Click here for a list of ingresses and stations during this period.

In the myths of many diverse cultures the sea represents the origins of all life, both divine and human. God ‘moves upon the face of the waters'. in stories which have arisen in places located far from each other – in Polynesia, the Norse Sagas, the Arctic, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Baltic cultures, and many others.		Above: Amed, East Bali. M. Reinhart 2010

		The primordial deluge at the beginning of time is another mythic signature reminding us of the connection between water and the processes of birth and rebirth. Noah and the Arc, Vasuki churning the ocean to produce the nectar of the gods, Inanna rescuing the Huluppu tree from the flood-waters at the beginning of time .... Right: 'The Deluge' by Gustav Doré Below: 'Polarity Therapy' by Randolph Stone

We are bathed and surrounded by the amniotic waters of our mother’s womb for the first nine months of our lives, and the notion of the ‘celestial waters’, often mentioned in ancient teachings, has been echoed in recent scientific discoveries. We know that the circulation of fluid in our bodies is essential for our health, and that within a very short time of dehydration our cerebral functioning is impaired.

Above: NASA		We live on a planet covered with water, out of which land masses have arisen, some large and some small. Sea water is a potent dissolving agent, and to visit the sea is to make a pilgrimage to the symbolic source of our own primal sense of origins, biological and spiritual. The hard edges of our preoccupations and ego fixations dissolve in the healing waters whose absence can also render the land infertile, choked by the bitterness of the salt left behind. Below: Picture courtesy of Atlas Tours.net
Lot’s wife was said to have been turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back. Although our feelings of regret, remorse and grief may bring forth salty tears, these solemn tributaries may also need to flow all the way back to the sea, lest in turning to look behind we likewise become fixated in the past.

The way of Chiron-Neptune is to experience our personal feelings deeply enough, with sufficient steady abiding, so that they open out into the realization that these stormy waves on the sea of our little lives are the very same feelings which, at this very moment, countless millions of others may also be feeling. For the sea represents something of our common humanity, beyond dogma, belief, or even cosmology. It is the felt sense of inhabiting a sacred world. No ‘proof’ is needed, no rational argument is adequate. This is the world of the mystic, where the presence of the Divine is a felt experience that needs no explanation.

The pioneering work of Masaru Emoto has demonstrated the receptivity of water to being the carrier of vibratory patterns which correspond with emotions, states of being, memory, and many other subtle impressions.

His response to the Gulf Oil spill on April 20th 2010, the day of the Ingress of Chiron into Pisces:

"Now let’s give energy of love and gratitude to all the living creatures in Mexico Gulf by praying, like this:

To whales, dolphins, pelicans, fishes, shellfishes, plankton, coral, algae and all creatures in Gulf of Mexico ..............."

It goes without saying, yet perhaps it needs to be said, that we humans have also polluted the very waters on which our life depends, to a shocking degree. Might we not also apply Emoto’s prayer to the very waters themselves?

Since the unspeakable, and ongoing, disaster at Fukushima, Japan, radioactive water has been pouring into the Pacific Ocean in attempts to cool down the stricken nuclear reactors. The very area illustrated below right is now the location of intensive nuclear radiation, which is spreading all around the planet, as you read this ...

The symbolism is horrifying. We have created ‘sea-monsters’, truly the stuff of nightmare. The problem is two-fold: not only will plastic not biodegrade in the ocean, but as it photo-degrades, it becomes highly absorbent of the various and numerous toxins found in sea-water, including pesticides and other chemicals. Tiny pellets of this highly toxified substance enter the food chain at the level of plankton, on upwards to algae, crustaceans, fish and other creatures, eventually the large sea mammals and those who feed on them - including us.

Ironically, the dangerously high levels of Mercury and other heavy metals found in the flesh of tuna fish in Japan may well turn out to be crucial in helping eco-warriors stop the brutal slaughter of whales and other large sea mammals, done in the name of entirely spurious ‘scientific research’ or ‘national customs’. However, we humans are also at the top of the marine food-chain. We use fish and other creatures from the sea not only for food. We take health supplements and use cosmetics made from fish, algae, sea-weed and minerals which come from the sea.

In the 17th Century the whale trade flourished in Greenwich, South London, the very same place from which all the world’s time zone are reckoned. Greenwich Mean Time – GMT. A harpooned whale could be dragged up the Thames estuary bleeding a veritable red sea before being slaughtered and beheaded. Whalebone was used in everything from corsets to blinds; whale oil was prized for lighting, for lubricating machinery, and also for cosmetics. Note the link between artificial, standardised time and whale slaughter - there are those who believe that the extinction of the large sea mammals would signal the final end-time of the human species, such is our link with these creatures.

*** While this article was being completed, news came through that HMS Astute, the British Navy's flagship nuclear submarine
had run aground - beached like the whales it seeks to emulate?

A Google search on the words ‘Grander’ and ‘orgonite’ will open up some trails for you to explore if you haven’t already done so. Although ridicule and persecution will follow any technology which acknowledges and indeed is based on the significance and power of the vibratory patterns which surround us, the reality of this knowledge is actually ‘indigenous’ to the human being. It is only the density of our conditioning and the folly of our inherited collective values which obscures this dimension from our direct perception. However, as the pace of change increases, and more large-scale political and social structures shake or collapse, with them will go the residue of the thought forms which created them. Then the stirrings of our re-awakening as a species may be first felt in the subtle currents which flow within the waters of our soul, sensing as it does the aliveness of the ‘invisible’ world through the direct experience of subtle vibration. When birth is about to occur, the 'waters break'.

Uranus, the great 'breaker-upper', has perhaps broken the waters during its recent transit through Pisces,

In a variation of the time-honoured Hermetic maxim ‘As above, so below’, we are perhaps invited to consider the condition of the waters within our own soul. Where are gyres of debris that may have been swirled into a toxic density within? Do we understand how to recycle and transform the rubbish within us, rather then ejecting it on to other people or holding it unconsciously within ourselves where it may turn into physical symptoms? What non-degradable, indigestible thoughts, feelings and habits make up that gyre, in addition to food which may not support our bodies as a vehicle for an expression of our higher nature? If we consider the esoteric principle that ‘energy follows thought’, the source of the pollution problems we face does not reside alone with the industrialisation and mechanization of society, but in the very thought forms and attitudes which led to the misuse of man’s capacity for innovation and invention. The inability to foresee consequences is itself a form of toxicity which arises from our disconnection with the sacred, and its manifestation in nature. And the touch of the sacred within the silent waters of the soul is a quiet, inner event occurring today and every day within countless individuals, contributing to the momentum towards positive external change. It cannot happen the other way around, or we will create more ‘plastic’ endeavours, more gyres of waste, on one level or another.

Awareness of the Oneness of creation and everything in it is natural to Pisces, but on a human level, we may fall into the error of editing ourselves out of this unified field, and so become prone to feeling an acute sense of world-weariness and separateness from the Divine Source. Indeed, this is the very poignancy of this sign, where the spiritual path may lead us through chronic melancholy or addictive patterns on the way to inner peace. The energy of Pisces is fulfilled through a sense of being of service to others in a variety of ways, not necessarily obvious or practical. For the feeling-sense of beingness is the gift of Pisces, and in a society characterised by secular fundamentalism, there may be precious little support or reflection of this. However, the sense of being part of an invisible ‘school’ or ‘shoal’ or ‘pod’ of fish, somehow all swimming in the same direction is a precious soul-quality which one can access in the ‘field’ of Pisces. Little by little, we learn to trust the ‘invisible’ world, and little by little it is revealed to us.

Just as there are ‘invisible’ currents we can feel while swimming in the sea, the Pisces soul is sensitive to all manner of energy currents and develops over time a gentle wisdom of response and felt comprehension. We know when to move away, or approach, when to open or close. If we try too hard to ‘explain’ to ourselves or others what is going on, we may get confused! The world of watery perceptions is an uneasy fit with the world of explanation, dogma, edifices of beliefs or even cosmologies. But the breadth of our being is used in a facilitative way, with or without our conscious intention. Small wonder that solitude can be so fruitful at times for the Pisces, who needs to commune silently with the great Immensity which feels so close at times, and yet so far away.

As we are in transition to the Age of Aquarius, this long immersion in the waters of Pisces could be seen as a period of time when the residue of the outgoing Age of Pisces, which began over 2000 years ago, will be rapidly dissolving.

Left: David Edward Byrd - poster for the Woodstock Festival, when some believe the Age of Aquarius began. The idea came forth in late 1968, during the last few weeks of the transit of Chiron through Pisces (1960 - 1969, including retrogradations). The legendary Woodstock Festival was held in August 1969, less than one week after 'Helter Skelter'. So the 'Crime of the Century' and the 'Love-Fest' occurred within days of each other.

Right: 16th C. Illustration of text of Hyginus (?)

Just as there is a feeling of urgency about breaking up the monster-gyres of rubbish and waste which bedevil our oceans, so the toxic imprints of the last two millennia are being broken up. Numerous people have taken on the task of doing this. For example, Karen Armstrong is a leading voice in creative enquiry into the history and beliefs of various religions, especially Christianity. And there are many more such people, some well-known and others perhaps quite unknown, who are unravelling the garment of ideas which has clothed our world up to the 21st Century, and working to purify the consequences of the dissolution that is occurring. Millions of healers, sensitives, contemplatives and shamans of all traditions may be hard at work, as you are reading this, seeing into where help is needed on the subtle planes of existence and mediating the energy of prayer and intercession. Not everyone has the calling to be an 'aid-worker' in the physical sense. Some are called to work in the 'unseen' world, while others work in the visible world ....

Within the sign of Aquarius, the impulse to understand, fix, innovate and improve is dominant, for it is a fixed sign. Being co-ruled by Saturn and Uranus, Aquarius is like a bridge between the old and new. On the side of innovation, we have been in a period where innovation and expansion have all but run out of control, rarely based in values which will support our human life in the longer term. Aquarius is also the sign of the ‘Waterbearer’ … and in this context it represents the understanding that enables us to cultivate compassion and a sense of felt connection with all life. There is a veritable explosion of new knowledge occurring at present, in many different fields, some of which is profoundly inspiring. But we are also daily confronted with the dark side of technology which results in depersonalization and the diminishment of the individual. The Sufi mystic Jelalluddin Rumi exhorts us to “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment”. Let us remember that as the ‘bearer of water’, Aquarius provides the form of understanding (air) which is meant to both contain and also dispense the waters ..... it serves the water, in both senses of the word. The Aquarian vessel humbly gives service to the waters as representing a more refined form of energy, and it also serves it to us at the table of the soul.

Finally, the ‘esoteric ruler’ of Pisces is Pluto. In 2006, Pluto was ‘demoted’ from planet status to ‘dwarf planet’, in a controversial move by the International Astronomical Union. However, when we understand the symbolism involved, this distinction makes perfect sense, although the term ‘dwarf planet’ does not! Pluto is indeed a quite different kind of object to any of the classical planets, and we can consider him ‘presiding’ over the Underworld of the Kuiper Belt, celestial home of objects like the TNOs (Trans-Neptunian Objects), Cubewanos, Plutinos, and others. It is also considered as the origin of Chiron and the Centaurs, with their elliptical orbits which cross over other planets’ pathways. Pluto signifies a quite different realm of experience, and its transits often accompany an important period of spiritual awakening, although the density and pressure of what we might go through during the transit itself may make it hard to see that at the time. That which is false and superficial is stripped away as we descend to a deeper level where what is real is revealed to us.

Pluto’s orbit cuts through that of Neptune, the ruling planet of Pisces, spending about 20 years of its 248-year orbit there - the last time was 1979 – 1999. This resonates beautifully with the symbolism of Pluto being the esoteric ruler of Pisces. Neptune in the horoscope shows where we may hold deep illusions, and therefore where we may experience deep dis-illusionment. Neptune’s process is about moving to a subtle kind of clarity and knowing, which is not cognitive, but rather through the feeling-mind. Access to this level of the mind is often opened through the energy of Pluto, and on a personal level, this may occur through a transit. From 2009 until 2019, the TNO called Orcus, which is like the mirror-image of Pluto, is going through early Virgo, making a long series of oppositions to both Chiron and Neptune in Pisces - 15 in total - the first one having occurred on the day that the stricken oil-rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico. Orcus perhaps represents this other dimension of Pluto, as it signifies the opening of subtle perceptions of all kinds, in such a way that they are unmistakable. They emerge into the light of day like the Orca jumping up out of the water into full visibility in the air.

The gift of the sign of Pisces is the felt-sense of being in touch with what is eternal, timeless, ineffable, indescribable, beyond time and space as we know it, without expecting that it should manifest in the world of 3-dimensions. Pluto-Orcus cuts through these illusions, re-directs our longings, opens our discernment, and enables us to honour the sacred inner connection offered by this watery reality ... without needing to prove or explain anything to anyone.