Neptune

What this is

Neptune is the planet that was found by arithmetic. Uranus would not keep to his orbit, so Urbain Le Verrier calculated where the thing pulling him must be; Johann Galle turned the Berlin telescope on that place on the twenty-third of September 1846, and it was there, within a degree. John Couch Adams had done the same sum in England and been ignored. He was named for the sea, and takes a hundred and sixty-five years to go round.

What it governs

Like Uranus he has no day and no hour; the planetary week was closed by the seven, and 1846 is far too late to join it. Modern astrologers gave him Pisces to co-rule with Jupiter, and that assignment is theirs — it is not in Ptolemy and not in Agrippa. In a life he is given the dissolving edge: dream, imagination, music, compassion, devotion, intoxication, and everything that will not hold a firm outline for long.

Its properties

His colour is sea-green going to violet; his stones are amethyst, aquamarine and larimar, and the card modern practice hands him is the Hanged Man, who gets his sight by hanging upside down and waiting. He has no metal, no number and no kamea, for the reason Uranus has none: the seven squares were cut for the seven planets and the set was finished centuries before he was seen. Upright he is mercy, imagination, the self set aside for something larger than itself. His shadow is fog — deception and self-deception, escape, the sacrifice nobody asked for.

Where else it appears

Poseidon shakes the earth from under the sea for the Greeks; Egypt keeps Nun, the formless water that was there before anything was made and that everything returns to; the Norse set Ægir and his nine daughters under the waves; the Celts give Manannán mac Lir, who hides a whole island under mist. The mystics describe the same drowning in every language — the Sufi's fana, the cloud of unknowing, the drop going back into the sea. These are one experience reported from several shores: the boundary between yourself and everything else going soft, which is the highest state or the most dangerous one depending entirely on whether you chose it.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

Neptune is on your wheel on the Astrology page and in the table beneath it, and on the horoscope he shows as the birth planet something faster is touching — a Neptune contact surfaces under Self. He gets no daily card, because he can sit on the same degree of your chart for a year and a half and saying so every morning would be noise rather than news. His place is the season panel, where the window and the exact dates are kept. When he is named there, be careful what you agree to, and read the thing twice while you are feeling generous.

Why it matters

He is so because a self with no soft edge cannot love, imagine or pray, and a self with nothing but soft edges cannot stand up in weather. Neptune matters because both of those failures look like virtue from the inside, and neither one can see itself. What he asks is that you keep the dreaming and the discernment in the same pair of hands — that you give yourself away on purpose, and to something worth it.

Correspondences

planet

Neptune

element

Water

zodiac

Pisces

colour

Sea-green, violet

stone

Amethyst, Aquamarine, Larimar

tarot

XII — The Hanged Man