The Magic of Neptune

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child.
Listen to the don'ts.
Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.
Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me.
Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
Shel Silverstein

•• Neptune: The Imagination of Creation ••

Everything comes alive initially through rose-colored glasses. We paint the entire world rose before it ever starts to become what we imagine it could be — imagination and an (often blind) belief in a different world is the seed of every change. Neptune is this belief in magic. It’s the wide open eyes that can see everything as it could be (or maybe as it already is on some other timeline?). It's vision, art, music, film, lighting, everything we use to communicate things in non-literal terms and everything we use to distort reality until it becomes what we want it to be.

Neptune is about merging, which means dissolving separation between self and other until what’s yours becomes mine and vice versa. It’s hiding and being deeply seen at once. It’s universal understanding. It’s connection on an energetic level. It’s illusion, deception, dreams, spirituality, boundarylessness, confusion, imagination.

Being able to imagine a better world is the first step to creating one. Neptune is the propagation of these seeds. We just have to nurture those seeds with time and energy and grounded devotion. And we can. Devotional, time-bound Capricorn sextiles Neptunian Pisces, after all: this energy is always at our disposal if we choose to use it.

•• Neptune as Art + Media ••

Neptune is music, art, poetry, film, psychic gifts and connections, deep and sometimes unexplainable bonds between us, understanding of the mind of the collective — anything that transcends the boundaries of time and all the walls between us. Neptune opens us up to things and experiences that feel otherworldly and magical. It brings us out of the mundane and into the great ocean of possibility. We decide whether that sea is going to be dark and turbulent or glimmering turquoise under a golden sun. Neptune is just the imagination of what could be. We carve out the channels that bring that vision to life.

What would life be without the mirror of art? Without music and film and fiction and painting and poetry and transcendent connections, what would we have left to move us and change us and open our minds?

A good film takes an idea and wraps it in layers and layers of gauzy Neptune. A good film is, essentially, a fictional reality (a lie!) that reveals to us some truth about our (or an) actual reality, some more directly than others. Watching a movie is viewing the truth of existence through, quite literally, a different lens. Film uses made-up dialogue as actors pretend to be people they aren’t while the filmmakers manipulate light and position the viewer where they can see only what they want them to see. Incredibly Neptunian and incredibly transformative. 

Music uses sound, the purest form of vibration, to communicate universal truths. When we hear a single chord or note with the right tone and inflection, we can feel what it means in a way that transcends words.

We use the same concepts in every form of art. We take the materials we have, warp them into a shape that effectively communicates what we want to communicate, and we drench it all in the proper light. We bring everything to life through Neptune and we run with it.

Neptune is the media: the creative work, the  illusions propped up as reality, the idolized and pedestalized celebrities (human beings!), the ocean of it all both swallowing and birthing us simultaneously. The age-old question of “which came first, the music or the misery?” (High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby and his sun/Venus-Neptune opposition) speaks to this point. Is the media what it is because of who we are, or are we who we are because of the media? I’d argue for both.

On a grand cultural scale, Neptune spreads things like wildfire. Its transits represent massive long-term trends, especially in media, marketing, advertising, and big ideas held (and lies told) about the solutions to our problems. But it always starts off as an idea that no one’s ever seen before. Something magical that could make life better. Sometimes that vision is utopian, sometimes it’s selfish; Neptune isn’t the judge of morality. (The ruler of Capricorn, Saturn, is that judge. Again, using that Pisces sextile to Capricorn is key to creating the world we want.)

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

It’s here that Neptune’s teeth come out. There is viciousness in the way that she gets us to fight so rabidly against our own best interests, in the way we’d die (literally, in some cases) for the lie she fed us. Neptune can point to the things that elude us as a culture or a generation because we were sold a dream that turned out to be a lie and now we can’t seem to let go of the hope that our pumpkins will all someday turn into flying-car-drawn carriages. It’s here that we collapse.

Neptune gets a bad rap for this exact reason. It is undoubtedly connected to illusion, delusion, escapism, deception and the dissolution of healthy boundaries. However, it’s our failing to take a grounded and paced approach to our visions of a more beautiful, pleasurable, fantastical world that metamorphoses our innocent dreams of paradise into a rancid, stinking hell. It’s the half-assed attempts at altering reality that set us up to fail. Lies are half-assed attempts at “changing” reality by bending others’ perceptions of it without their consent. Using substances, sleep, sex, or isolation can be half-assed attempts at temporarily “changing” our personal reality by not fully and deeply participating in it.

“If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.”

That cream-filled point on the horizon will always escape us until we look down at our feet, check (or create?) the map, and plot our steps forward. When we combine Neptunian vision with an earthy, practical awareness of the steps we need to take to actually BUILD the world we so desperately want, we come through the tunnel into a greater reality where magic is indisputable and real improvement happens. A reality where the whole world is pulsing and alive, where sunlight highlights our cheekbones instead of blinding us, where synchronicity abounds and the link between the tepid present and the incandescent future is made of steps lined only with the hands of grandfather clocks, not unconquerable mountains and oceans.

This is Neptune’s highest good. We have seeds to nurture. We all have our own role to play in the creation of magic. Neptune can soften the harsh lights and blend our present into our future.

Allowing ourselves to come alive through our dreams is always step one.