Neptune joined to Pluto marries collective dreams and underground forces.
A new cycle of civilization opens: the dreams and deep forces of an era are renewed.
For historical study, a marker of the start of a very long cultural cycle.
Attributing to this aspect, absent from current charts, an influence on one’s own life.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
Neptune and Pluto only meet again after about four hundred ninety years, the longest rhythm astrology uses.
Their last conjunction formed in 1891–1892, around 8° of Gemini; the one before dated from the late 14th century, around 1398–1399 according to calculations. The two planets stayed close for about ten years, and anyone born between roughly 1885 and 1898 carried it. All of them are now gone: no chart of a living person contains it.
Symbolically, this conjunction would unite the world of dreams, beliefs, and collective imagination, associated with Neptune, and that of buried forces, endings, and rebirths, associated with Pluto. Astrologers who study the great cycles link it to the emergence of movements that shaped the whole 20th century: nascent psychoanalysis, cinema, new political theories, spiritual revival. Gemini, the sign of communication, colors this reading with a revolution in ideas and in how they spread.
Its interest is twofold: to shed light on the charts of those born during these years, many writers, painters, and scientists of the 20th century, and to mark the starting point of the cycle described by the other pages devoted to these two planets. It says nothing about the character of a person today.
No current relationship is concerned.
For public figures born around 1890, when the conjunction touched Venus or the Moon, astrologers saw an approach to love mixing idealism and intensity, at a time when Victorian mores were beginning to crack. In a modern comparison of charts, it can only appear with an ancestor’s chart, as a curiosity.
This passage touches no profession practiced today.
In the astrological biographies of the generation born around 1890, it is often linked to artists, thinkers, and pioneers who renewed the arts, psychology, or politics in the early 20th century. The charts of abstract painters, silent-film directors, or founders of spiritual movements of that time offer often-cited examples. These links remain authors’ readings, with no demonstrated value.
Nothing in present-day life comes under this aspect.
To picture the era in which it formed, just think of the 1890s: the Lumière brothers’ first screenings, the early days of the automobile, world’s fairs, the vogue for spiritualism and the occult in Parisian salons. A period of teeming ideas and beliefs, between triumphant science and a thirst for mystery, which astrologers of cycles like to cite as an example.
Neither the ancients nor the astrologers of the Renaissance knew these two planets, and the 1891–1892 conjunction was only interpreted after the fact, Pluto not having been spotted until 1930.
Astrologers of cycles, such as André Barbault, saw in it the opening of an immense cycle of civilization, and reread the previous conjunction, around 1399, as a foreshadowing of the Renaissance. These very ambitious readings rest on few points of comparison, since only one full cycle has been reconstructed; Versana reports them as hypotheses.
For a present-day reader, this page sheds light on the history of the cycle and nothing else.
Tradition calls it variable: the two functions merge, and its color depends on the planets involved.
Transpersonal planet. Modern planet, observed in 1846 (Johann Galle, from calculations by Urbain Le Verrier).
The profile of NeptuneCounted between 0° and 8° apart.
The conjunctionTranspersonal planet. Discovered in 1930 (Clyde Tombaugh); a dwarf planet for the IAU since 2006, kept by astrology.
The profile of PlutoNo. The most recent meeting dates from 1891–1892, and the aspect stayed within the orb used by Versana only for births from about 1885 to 1898. All these people are gone. The engine will therefore never find this aspect in the chart of a living person.
Not before the 24th century: the cycle of Neptune and Pluto lasts nearly five hundred years. It is the longest cycle between two planets used in astrology, and no generation can observe more than one phase of it in its lifetime. Astrologers who study it therefore work on historical reconstructions rather than direct observations.
To read the charts of public figures born around 1890, and to understand the starting point of the cycle whose sextile, still active, is the phase lived by today’s generations. It thus complements the page devoted to this sextile, and helps explain why so many contemporary charts show these two planets sixty degrees apart.