Neptune at a right angle to Pluto: ideals and forces of mutation work against each other.
Dream and mutation collide: a phase of crisis in a very long collective cycle.
As a historical marker, the sign of a time when an era’s ideals collide with its transformations.
Believing that this square could appear in a chart today.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
A square forms twice in each great cycle of these two planets, once on the way up and once on the way down.
The last one, a waning one, came several decades before their 1891–1892 meeting; those born during that passage are all gone. The next square, a waxing one, will not form for several decades, well after current births, because the two planets are for now staying close to a sextile. No chart calculated for a living person contains it, and Versana’s engine will never flag it.
Symbolically, this square would set in tension the imagination, beliefs, and utopias of an era, associated with Neptune, and the underground forces of destruction and regeneration, associated with Pluto. Specialists in the great cycles see in it a phase of crisis: a moment when the dreams inherited from the previous conjunction collide with transformations they had not foreseen, and when other visions of the world must be invented.
If you are studying a 19th-century chart in which this square appears, read it through the two areas it connects and the personal points it reaches, without giving it more weight than a collective backdrop. For current charts, the page devoted to the sextile is the only one that concerns this pair of planets.
No current love story comes under this square.
Symbolically, it would suggest a pull between a century’s idea of love, its dreams of fusion or purity, and the deep upheavals of its mores. It could only appear by setting a current chart beside that of a forebear born in the 19th century, an exercise in genealogical curiosity with no bearing on a living relationship.
This square concerns no profession practiced today.
Astrologers who study the 19th century sometimes link this phase to clashes between religious or political ideals and the industrial revolution: social utopias confronted with factories, Romanticism facing the railway. These retrospective readings, which Versana mentions to complete the series, prove nothing. They mostly show how astrologers of cycles tell history, looking in the sky for the echo of great social and intellectual ruptures.
A present-day person’s everyday life does not depend on this square.
It is understood as a stage in a cycle that goes far beyond the length of a human life, and is a reminder that some aspects only make sense on the scale of history. Those who enjoy 19th-century novels may find in it, symbolically, the climate of mingled disillusion and faith they describe.
This square was never observed by an astrologer who knew it existed: Neptune was discovered in 1846, Pluto in 1930, and the most recent passage was already over.
It was found again by calculation, then interpreted as a phase of tension in the relationship between Neptune and Pluto. Dane Rudhyar invited us to read these phases as stages in a slow breathing of humanity, rather than as catastrophes. These reconstructions are hard to verify, for lack of enough points of comparison over five centuries. Versana presents them for the coherence of the whole.
For a reader today, it is a symbol, not a character trait.
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 83° and 97° apart.
The squareTranspersonal planet. Discovered in 1930 (Clyde Tombaugh); a dwarf planet for the IAU since 2006, kept by astrology.
The profile of PlutoNo. The last square came several decades before the 1891–1892 conjunction, and the next will not form for a long time, as the two planets are for now staying close to a sextile. It is therefore absent from the charts of everyone living, and Versana will never display it.
So that the series of aspects is complete, and for the rare readers who study 19th-century charts. It also explains the square’s place in the long cycle of these two bodies, whose current sextile is the only phase lived by present generations and their children.
It would set an era’s shared convictions against its forces of deep transformation. For specialists in the great cycles, it is a phase of crisis, in which inherited dreams must give way to others. It is an interpretive construction, with no demonstrated value, which Versana presents for documentary purposes.