Neptune Re-Engages With Pluto

Neptune and Pluto are about to reprise their late Eighties sextile and not only that, this Neptune-Pluto sync will run until 2032!

If this seems strange, I get it: What kind of astrological influence stays in play that long? Essentially, only this one! As the two most remote planets within our solar system, Neptune and Pluto are outside of time as we know it and the interactive cycle between them takes centuries.

They were most recently conjunct at 7-8° Gemini from 1891 to 1892 and will be conjunct again at 12° Gemini in 2384. (This is why you don’t hear about people having Pluto Returns.) The long view is that we’re in the very early stages of a 493 year-ish era that began in the early 1890s.

The first alignment between Neptune and Pluto since the early 1890s was the friendly and fortunate 60° sextile that ran from 1950 to 1961. The two planets then diverged over the Sixties, albeit maintaining a loose, fuzzy connection.

Round Two kicked off in 1971 and continued until 1986. They were the most diverged from 2002 until 2016 – being up to 10° out of orb with one another at some points – but have been reconverging since 2022.

August 16 is the first exact Neptune-Pluto sextile since 1986 and yes, it will be in effect for eight years.

What does this mean for you?

Broadly this indicates stronger ties between Scorpios and Pisceans + Aries and Aquarians as well as –  to a lesser extent –  Capricorns and Pisceans. This snazzy sextile will also ensure maximum oomph between those sectors of your birth chart, even if you don’t have any natal factors there.

And from now on, if you’re having a Pluto transit, you’ll have aid from Neptune and vice-versa.

While Neptune-Pluto alignments of this ilk are most tangible as a kind of cultural backdrop and zeitgeist barometer, those of you born before the Eighties may be able to look back and detect profound life patterns operating just below the threshold.

Neptune is shamanic, a magician who moonlights as a trickster and Pluto is a chthonic primordial force of pure instinct: however they’re impacting in your personal chart, your insights are highly unlikely to be explicable, let alone an anecdote. Maybe they’re classified, for your psyche only?

For cultural reference, 1971 – the year that the most recent iteration of the sextile began – saw the founding of Greenpeace, Walt Disney World and the world’s first domestic violence shelter. The Space Race was full throttle and John Lennon launched Imagine to more or less instant and enormous success. He credited the Primal Scream Therapy he did in the wake of his acrimonious break-up with the world’s biggest band at the time but not his wife, Yoko Ono.

The visionary and self-taught scientist Tu Youyou isolated the vital anti-malarial artemisinin from Sweet Wormwood and the US House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Less idealistically but perhaps pertinent, the U.N. voted to expel Taiwan (then the Republic of China) in favor of the People’s Republic of China.

In 1986, as that particular Neptune-Pluto phase wound down, evangelical space optimism imploded with the Challenger shuttle and if you weren’t freaked out by Chernobyl, there was always the spectre of AIDS.

But the aesthetic – make-up, music etc – was rad and mostly guilt-free: Your hair mousse could be literally evaporating the ionosphere above you and people would be too polite or out of it to say anything.

Similarly, unless you were actually a spy, soldier or politician, it was socially acceptable to glean your geopolitical insights from The Bourne Supremacy – the best-selling book of that year.

Inflation? In 1986 the only thing inflated were your expectations and self-audited dance skills. The last exact Neptune-Pluto sextile even had a kind of soundtrack: the Communard’s Don’t Leave Me This Way was the most played track that month.

Thoughts?

Images:
Gilbert Williams 
Claus Wickrato