Poets, Mavericks & Prophets

To talk of Neptune is to conjure ghosts, and people love ghost stories. Whether we believe in an afterlife or not, most of us are enthralled by the idea of parallel realities — and we visit one, every night, while we sleep. Sometimes, in our waking life, our mind wanders and we daydream, imagine stories we desire — maybe captured by a piece of art, or elated by a sensation, charmed by an encounter, awestruck by serendipity. We pray, meditate, chant, conduct ritual, all to reach this specific state where the boundaries between us and the world dissolve, and we are no more alone, yet part of a magnificent universe, all interconnected. It is suddenly coherent to us, in its tremendous mystery. We long to remain in this understanding, because it is the opposite of fear. It gives us a home we have always dreamed of — vast, soothing, exciting. A feeling of safety of a dolphin in an ocean. An ethereal playground.

There are places we can go which are designed to takes us via a collective journey into storyland, and if the map is done right, we spend a few hours or a entire day travelling the landscape of someone else’s mind, inhabited by creatures just like us, yet larger than life, making that reality as palpable as anything we can touch. There is incredible release in resting our everyday thoughts at another’s door, and just walking in. As children, being told a fairytale, so we can slip into sleep.

At times this is done in the company of others, in a cinema, a theatre, a concert — or indeed, a temple, allowing for a camaraderie in the reverie, invoking the Dionysian Mysteries, facilitating a dipping in and out of a simulacrum via the sheer presence of another being. But, more frequently, particularly nowadays, we step into this altered state unaccompanied, and often unprepared, as if entering a book — without the actually physicality of its pages giving us an anchor in the world where our feet walk.

Then there are the mind-altering substances, the liquid mediums, ancient storytellers, both divine and wicked, which offer this state of narrative ecstasy in exchange of our time (and, often, health and resources). This is the place where religion and ideologies battle for our attention, both backed by the power of myth, with its capacity to inspire — the latter much more mundane in its intent to capture our minds, and force only one narrative to dominate it.

The narrative, itself, might be many things, but the ways it enters our bloodstreams, both metaphorically and literally, is by the vehicle of our capacity to connect to a sea of unconscious materials, forming into patterns, creating images in relation to our experiences. These currents had myriad names in history — as only denotations changed, not the human experience of life. Their potency indicates an independent faculty of a deity, which must be in some way consumed to be communed with. In psychological science of the 20th century, these gods and goddesses became functions within our own micro universes, our minds — emotional turbulences, unrelated to macro occurrences. Nevertheless, famously (an infamously), through the works of CG Jung, divinity has been transpersonally adopted into our deified psyches, through the concept of the collective unconscious, and these celestial potencies were called archetypes. We use them to name anything we cannot rationally explain, but which affects us greatly.

Astrologically, all of the above, constitutes the realms of the planet Neptune.

“Dark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system.” says NASA, omitting the planet astrophysicists’ dwarfed — Pluto, named after the god of the underworld. This trespass I would, personally, dare not to do. Thus, after Pluto, the planet at the very outskirts of our systemic stellar remit, Neptune arrives second-to-last, in relation to the Sun. Named after Poseidon, the Roman Neptune, the god of the seas, it follows the ancient tradition (circa 4 BCE) of naming planets according to Greco-Roman deities (emerging from ancient Egypt and Babylon), as ruling life on Earth according to their nature. Equally corresponding to deities in other ancient cultures, as is the sophisticated Hindu cosmology.

The philosophical aspect of this belief seems sound — in a purely proportional relation to our tiny existence on one of the planets of this vast solar merry-go-round, and amidst all the other ferris wheels in the sky, there certainly is a chance that larger living entities affect smaller living entities. And how could we, in our foolish arrogance, assign personality to our relatively simple biologically-based consciousness, and deny such complex worlds, immeasurably older than us, their own?

If the dance between the Sun and the Moon determines our lives in the profoundest way, creating day and night, tides and hormonal cycles, and all we need to sustain our life to grow — then what would be the effect of the neighbouring Venus and Mars, or a Mercury? And is there one? It naturally, an logically, follows.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, such philosophical concerns, at least in the West, had firmly been banished into the realms of superstition, and further not taken seriously in scientific terms the way they were for all prior millennia — up to 18th century Europe. And in this transitional period of dis-enchantment between a mystical view of a living universe and moving the centre of our worlds into our own industrious rational psyches, freeing ourselves from the bounds of the approximate — Neptune, the planet, had been discovered, or rather, finally seen, in 1846. Hereto obscured from view, as all the astrologies (and astronomical knowledge) thus far ended with the visible universe, the lord of hard reality, himself — the planet Saturn.

The principle of selfless devotion and communal reverie burst from the realms of the imaginal into a tangible world of things, and has remained here ever since, with a wide range of consequences.

Almost at the same time, in synchronicity, in the period leading to this astrophysical and technological breakthroughs, photography had been born (1822-1832), and closely following the Neptune discovery, so did film (1885-1895). Two new mediums have been created, in a span of a few decades — ones that mimic our everyday lives to perfection, and transfer them onto a separate dimension, a world in-between, a carbon copy of what is known. Altered and arranged into someone’s narrative intention. In social terms, the world has changed, and drastically, introducing aspects of universal love and care into very mundane aspects of everyone’s lives. Seeping into our concepts of what the world should be, the concern about our fellow men, in a planetary sense, came to the fore. Internationalism and solidarity not according to ethnicity or religion, but to one’s societal predicament, began its global emergence.

In his seminal work, Cosmos and the Psyche, cultural historian Richard Tarnas speaks of Neptune as the “archetype of the archetypal dimension itself, the anima mundi“.

The dangers of the Neptunian impulse are many, but like the ice giant itself, only observable through a specific lens. Evolutionary astrologer Jeffrey Wolf Green, in his book on Neptune, Whispers From Eternity, spoke of the planet’s symbolic correlation to the god complex, a state of inflation wherein the ego of an individual identifies itself with an archetypal image, a deity, a mission, a cause. This gives birth to delusions, and a disintegration of a person’s organisation of Self.

This can also occur through substance abuse, where the addicted individual seeks that specific release from the tension of Self, seeking a feeling of boundlessness, connectedness, mythic presence in the world, but through an intoxicating intermediary. The key word being toxin — a poison injected into the body in search of the healing of the soul.

In relationships Neptune symbolises both great love and great illusion, and the inability to pinpoint which of the phenomena is occurring. The Neptunian infatuation with another is, in fact, the longing for absolute merging, for being a two instead of one, a movement towards being multitudes. In this dreamlike state, where anything is possible, the opportunities are endless, just as is the vast Ocean of the Universe, where aloneness ceases to exist.

By immersing ourselves into countless threads of narrations, be they our own, or someone else’s, we finally give ourselves permission to freely dive into the currents of the ethereal sea — with a hope that they would lead us into the easing of the confines of our mundane lives through the exhilarating, mesmerising landscapes they offer — and the manifold mysteries they reveal.

In this Neptunian state of enchantment, we offer our egos at the altar of the collective soul (genuine or hijacked), and in this space of sacrifice, a tremendous amount of transformation, as well as abuse, can occur.

Author: ©Milana Vujkov

Related texts by the author:

Film, the Alchemical Medium: The Transformative Potential of the Moving Image

The Alchemical Screen: Enchantment and the Cinema

Archetypal Enchantment and the Twin of David Lynch

YouTube channel:

youtube.com/@lolaandthepoets

LITERATURE:

Green, Jeffrey Wolf, Neptune: Whispers From Eternity (School of Evolutionary Astrology, 2014)

Jung, C.G., Psychology and Alchemy, (London: Routledge, 1968)

Tarnas, Richard, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Plume, 2007)