Neptune

What Neptune represents

Neptune expresses the longing to merge into something larger: art, music, spirituality, absolute love, nature. It refines sensitivity, imagination and empathy, to the point of letting a person feel what others are going through. Its excess is confusion: losing oneself in the other, idealising until disappointment sets in, fleeing whatever is too hard into daydreams or other escape routes. Wherever it is placed, outlines blur, for better and for worse.

Neptune was discovered in 1846, in the part of the sky where calculations based on irregularities in the orbit of Uranus had predicted it would be. It was later given Pisces, a mutable water sign whose porousness and sense of the infinite it shares, while Jupiter remains the sign’s ruler in the older tradition. Neptune has no settled exaltation or fall, and its symbolism, young on the scale of astrology’s long history, remains more open than that of the planets known since antiquity.

Its rhythm in the sky

With a cycle of about a hundred and sixty-five years, Neptune spends some fourteen years in each sign. It is a generational planet: everyone born over roughly the same fourteen years shares its sign. It therefore describes the ideals and illusions of a generation, what it hopes for, what it idealises and what lets it down, far more than a trait belonging to each of its members.

Its retrograde phase lasts more than five months each year, so a little over four people in ten are born with Neptune retrograde: far too common a situation to single anyone out. Neptune becomes personal through its house, the area where the person idealises or lets themselves drift, and through its links with the personal planets or an angle, which measure how strongly that sensitivity colours their character.

Neptune and the ideal of love

In a birth chart, a strong Neptune, in contact with Venus, the Moon, the Sun or an angle, often describes a love in search of the ideal: the soulmate, total union, understanding without words. People with this emphasis know how to love with delicacy and a great capacity for forgiveness. They also risk seeing in the other what they hope for rather than who the other really is, sacrificing themselves, or being swept up in the needs of a partner they would like to rescue.

Between two charts, Neptune deserves attention mainly when one person’s Neptune meets the other’s personal planets or angles. These contacts can bring an almost magical tenderness, shared inspiration, a feeling of instant recognition, and also misunderstandings, expectations never voiced, an idealisation that paves the way for disappointment. Since everyone of the same generation has it in the same sign, Neptune’s sign says almost nothing about a particular bond.

To go further

• Liz Greene, The Outer Planets and Their Cycles (1983)
• Howard Sasportas, The Gods of Change (1989)