Neptune facing Pluto: collective imagination and forces of metamorphosis stand face to face, halfway through their very long cycle.
Dream confronts mutation: the high point of a very long collective cycle.
For the study of cycles, the marker of the high point of the great cycle.
Imagining that it could concern a current birth chart.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
Neptune and Pluto face each other only once per cycle of about five hundred years, halfway between two conjunctions.
The last opposition falls, according to calculations, in the 17th century, between the meeting of the late 14th century and that of 1891–1892; the next will not come for several centuries. No living person, nor their children or grandchildren, will carry this aspect, which Versana therefore cannot encounter in a current chart.
Symbolically, this opposition would set a civilization’s beliefs face to face with the underground forces that transform it, at the high point of the great cycle begun by the previous conjunction. Specialists in cycles make it the moment when the dreams born at the start of the cycle reach their full expression, then begin to confront their limits. Some link it to the wars of religion and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, when the medieval view of the world gave way before Galileo’s telescopes.
This page exists only to complete the series of aspects and to shed light on the structure of the cycle of Neptune and Pluto. It says nothing about a person today. Readers curious about history will find a marker here; others can turn to the sextile, the only phase of this cycle that today’s generations share.
No romantic bond of today, or of tomorrow, is concerned by this opposition.
Symbolically, it would suggest a confrontation between a civilization’s ideal of love and the deep transformations of its mores, over the scale of several generations. It is of no use for comparing two charts of living people, and Versana includes it here only to complete the cycle.
Nothing in today’s professions is tied to it.
Astrologers of cycles who take an interest in the 17th century sometimes see in it a period of confrontation between old beliefs and the scientific revolution, in the time of Galileo, Descartes, and the great trading companies. These very distant readings remain hypotheses, impossible to verify, which Versana mentions without granting them any demonstrated value.
Today’s daily life has no connection to this opposition.
It belongs to the scale of long history, that of centuries and civilizations, not of a single life. It simply reminds us that not every aspect of the zodiac concerns living people, and that a page of astrology can sometimes serve above all to understand the past.
Neptune and Pluto were known to no one when this opposition took place, and it was never observed by astrologers who knew it existed.
It was reconstructed by calculation, then interpreted after the fact by the authors of the great cycles, who associate it with the high point of the cycle of civilization. These readings rest on very old historical data and on a single comparable occurrence; they are impossible to verify, but they show the ambition of mundane astrology, which seeks to read history over centuries.
Today, it mostly serves to understand the structure of the longest cycle used in astrology, without saying anything about anyone.
Tradition calls it dynamic: the two functions are said to pull against each other and call for an adjustment, without foretelling anything.
Transpersonal planet. Modern planet, observed in 1846 (Johann Galle, from calculations by Urbain Le Verrier).
The profile of NeptuneCounted between 172° and 188° apart.
The oppositionTranspersonal planet. Discovered in 1930 (Clyde Tombaugh); a dwarf planet for the IAU since 2006, kept by astrology.
The profile of PlutoNo. The last opposition goes back to the 17th century according to calculations, and the next will not come for several centuries, well after the 22nd. Neither living people nor their close descendants will carry this aspect, and no chart calculated today on Versana will show it.
To complete the series of aspects and show how the great cycle of the two slowest planets is organized. Only the sextile of this cycle concerns living generations today; the 1891–1892 conjunction marks its recent starting point, and the opposition is its summit, centuries earlier.
It would confront collective imagination with the deep forces of transformation, at the high point of a cycle of nearly five centuries. The authors of the great cycles see in it the moment when a civilization’s dreams reach their full expression. It is an interpretive hypothesis, which Versana presents without granting it any demonstrated value.