April 9, 2010 - Reversing the Day

When the Moon contacts Neptune it's a good time to indulge in Dionysian revelry.

Intensities involving getting violently happy - ecstatic - or involving a loss of self in any way got revived with the Moon's transit over Neptune. The more I look, the more important Neptune seems, as the sole present arbiter between the major opposition of our age - Saturn/Uranus. Neptune contacts Uranus by semisextile and Saturn by quincunx, which creates what's known as an "Irritation Triangle" in the Huber system of astrology, defined by its urge toward "constant movement and stimulating activity...The energies stored in it are looking for a way to resolve the state of the opposing pressures, the blockage of energy flow and the rigid attitude they produce. Over the quincunx, people with this aspect figure are painfully aware of the liberation of tension as a desperate longing" (Aspect Pattern Astrology, 177, Huber).

I went to a goth/metal concert last night, and it was surreal how many people lost themselves in the music completely. Even the singer was amazed, when the crowd surged and sang the choruses to his music at the tops of their lungs. He stopped singing at one point and mouthed, "fuck, me..." at his drummer while we sang and cheered and stomped and clapped and jumped and head-banged non-stop for about four hours straight. We ended the evening all singing the chorus to one of the songs in unison, over and over, "What will be. What will always be. Never-ending light." There were no drums, no guitar, no keyboards; it was like a spiritual chant. That's Neptune, right there, when hundreds of people crammed into a tiny theater, dressed in black with spikes and eyeliner and lace and leather sing lyrics like that together, completely caught up in the night.

Saturn/Uranus' opposition is stressing us all out, as we all struggle with mounting debt or decreased lifestyle and raised prices, combined with reduced wages, various global catastrophes, and right-wing vitriol pounding the airwaves. We are waking up to find that most young people in this country won't make as much money as their parents made. But we were raised on a steady diet of progress, so if the typical definitions of "quality of life" are regressing, then either we have to come to grips with the flaws in our Western ideal of "progress," (Saturn) and/or we have to create a new definition for "quality of life" (Uranus). This philosophical issue is set against the backdrop mentioned above: these difficult times make us all want to radically reimagine the meaning of a good-quality life and to live according to our ideals, but the lack of money comes back again and again to bite us in the ass. To put it more positively, it comes back again and again to remind us that our ideals can't survive without sufficient material foundations.

It's painful for our revolutionary ideals about life to get hammered by the fact that they're rarely materially feasible (Uranus getting hammered by Saturn). Hence, Neptune; hence the concert of last night. The fact that the concert began just after the partile conjunction of the Moon to Neptune, just minutes after the Moon slipped into Pisces on the cusp of the party-hardy 5th house, only made the concert that much more indicative of the Irritation Figure between Neptune, Saturn and Uranus dominating the sky. People, in their stress about the opposition described above, unconsciously created a Dionysian experience in the concert. Not to escape from the stress (which would have been the case if it had been an Ambivalence Figure, with blue lines to Neptune), but to engage with it in a more mobile way and to come to a deeper understanding of it.

It's hard to define exactly what form this understanding takes, because Neptune is, by definition, formless. However, if we take Neptune to represent philosopher Tim Freke's idea of Big Love, or a sense of oneness with all beings, then the experience of Big Love is, in the archetypal cosmology of the present day, the mediating factor between Saturn and Uranus discussed above. Neptune-esque experiences can provide new information and the impetus to seek out ways to help us bridge the Saturn/Uranus opposition.

I hope the concert was fruitful for everyone. Especially for the two people I accidentally smacked in the face in my excitement. I hope everyone came back to the struggles of their lives afresh, with new understanding that only comes from entering a different reality. This is only achieved by spiritual experience, which is what Neptune and last night were all about.