Neptune, being invisible to the human eye, was discovered by telescope on September 23, 1846. Uranus is occasionally visible to humans, but Neptune required humans to invent (or perhaps rediscover) the telescope to map its celestial path and understand it as a planet. This is the first archetype of Neptune, that it is the invisible, only made visible through conscious effort.
Around when Neptune was discovered, that is during the time of 1846 it was just about to enter the sign of Pisces, which it became associated with later by theosophist astrologers after it coursed through Pisces. Sepharial began observing Neptune’s traits and comparing them with the sign characteristics of Pisces — intuition, mysticism, escapism, dreams, spirituality — and found a resonance.
My favorite framework for understanding Planets is that they are functional material symbols of immaterial Archetypes, which can be measured by the motion of their functional symbolic form. Whether an archetype can be attributed to a self-conscious mind or not does not really matter (although, being a neo-animalist, I believe they can), but the forms do convey the archetypes.
When Neptune was discovered, a Neptunian Pisces archetype was unfolding in the minds of humans, which was later known as “Spiritualism”. Now, my dear and gentle readers, does that not sound like the Archetype of Neptune in Astrology? This lent itself further by being associated with random synchronicity with the God “Neptune” who is King of the Sea. The Sea itself represents the unknown, or unconscious, with even today only 24% of the ocean floor having been mapped. When Neptune was discovered, all of the Ocean floor was virtually unseen. Ah, what a naming Harmony, Captain Nemo himself could not be prouder.
What we get to with this is that Neptune represents the unseen. The unseen is both the spiritual and the illusion of the mis-seen. The illusion veils that which is true, and also veils that which is not material substantial form. I find Neptune prominent in the charts of meditators, who are examining the unseen, as well as myth weavers, storytellers, liars, deceivers, channelers, people who work in the film industry, light workers, energy healers, psychics, intuitives, knowers of dreams, shamans, psychonauts, and those who work with fluids.
Neptune conjunct the Ascendant, the ruler of the Ascendant, the Midheaven, and the ruler of the Midheaven are especially common in the charts of meditators or energy healers.
Through all of this, one must be careful of Neptune’s incredible power to dissolve as it spiritualizes, for this will affect any topic area in the chart that it tightly aspects that topic’s ruler. For instance, if one were to have Neptune opposed Mars in a matter of three degrees and Scorpio was the ruler of the fourth, one would experience dissolution of family in one’s life, that is, until one has learned to have a spiritual relationship to what family is.
Neptune also always delivers a powerful capacity for imagination, which is again the immaterial. This leans into a capacity to visualize, but not necessarily to manifest through visualization as Neptune does not bring into the material; rather, it brings the material into the vastness of the immaterial, as is the nature of Pisces, which it is associated with.
What happens if you are meant to be connected to the unseen, but you do not consciously work with this energy, then two types of unhealthy expressions can arise. The first is that the ocean goers become oblivion seekers and sail to distant shores through the use and overuse of Substances that create altered states of consciousness in addictive and self-destructive ways, as Neptune dissolves their material form into the illusion. The second is that a depression can arise through not acknowledging one’s own spiritual being and separating that being from the material life we embody.
Either way, the archetype principle of Neptune, just as it did by bringing forth spiritualism into the world soul in 1846, is attempting to force the soul into a shamanic healing process in order to make its archetype conscious in the native. When Neptune again went through Pisces from 2011 to 2025, it again brought this type of magic into the world soul with the rise of Microdosing, Ayahuasca therapies, Neo Shamanism, and the psychedelic revival. Moreover, though the manifestation of Neptune in Pisces focused on the rise of social media influencers, creating an illusion of life as a constant high of experience and attention.
As Neptune moves into Aries we are going to be called now to reclaim the individuality of our souls and minds from the collective madness into the experience of our own path. We must develop a personal connection to our own journey and disconnect from identifying with the boundless collective represented by pisces into our own present mythologies and centered being. Those with prominent Neptune placements are called to shift their work from expanding consciousness to embodying consciousness and teaching that path as a way of healing the world’s wounds that the current human archetype shift is generating in the mundane world of politics and history.
Will you rise to the call?
