When the lies fail, they take us to war.

Our Place in Space

When we look out into space from Planet Earth we see the Sun and the Moon and the planets dancing around us, their non-stop, regular, celestial rhythm creating ever-changing patterns.

In reality only the Moon goes round the Earth but from our earthly viewing platform it seems to us that Planet Earth is the centre of the Universe. And each of us assumes that we are the centre of this world.

Feeling ourselves to be the centre of the Universe sounds arrogant, and of course, astronomically, it’s not true. But metaphorically, it is essential for understanding who we are and for finding meaning in our world. Without understanding our own unique angle on Life, how can we hope to see other people and the external world clearly?

A birth chart is a circular map of the heavens, with the newborn baby right in the middle surrounded by the planets and galaxies. It’s a road map that contains extremely useful information about our own, and other peoples, understanding of the world. As people are very fond of saying nowadays, our perception creates our reality. To the extent that this is true, astrology becomes invaluable because it provides quite an objective account of how we see ourselves and we experience the world and the people around us.

Equally importantly and harder to grasp in a secular culture, it shows how the cosmos experiences us, and how we fit into a much larger pattern than we can imagine,

A birth chart is a very simplified map of the heavens but it is also true and, most importantly, it’s a very useful tool to improve the quality of our lives.

How astrologers perceive the relationships between the planets in a birth chart:

Look at your chart. (If you never have, use free software such as astro.com to calculate it.)

It’s a circle of 360 degrees made up of the 12 zodiac signs. The symbols for the planets are distributed within the circle. Depending on where they were when you were born they make different angular relationships with each other within that circle.

The 60 degree and the 120 degree angular relationships between planets are considered ‘good’ and ‘easy’. The 90 degree angle and the 180 degree angle. are considered ‘bad’ and ‘difficult’.

Nor are the ‘bad’ aspects always bad. They often represent the obstacles that life throws in our way to force us to grow up and get creative.

The supposedly ‘easy’ 60-degree aspect between Pluto and Neptune is a good illustration of this. Both Pluto and Neptune are symbols of how we relate to the enormous, mysterious forces that transform each generation, when radical material shifts and deep spiritual changes interact with each other. Obviously these are huge concepts that cannot be glibly classified as easy even when they are in a ‘good’ sextile aspect to each other.

Angular relationships between 2 planets usually last about 2 years, then the faster of the two planets moves off and the relationship breaks up.

During this period they make geometrically exact aspects to each other between 1 and 5 times.

The present Neptune-Pluto 60 degree sextile (sextile refers to one sixth of the 360 degrees in a circle) is quite different.

It began in 1947 and will end in 2034. That’s 87 years! By 2034 it will have made 49 exact aspects. No other two planets do this sort of thing.

Neptune and Pluto get locked into this long relationship to each other about twice every 494 years. This happens because Plutos orbit around the Sun is unusual. At certain points it moves closer to the Sun than Neptune. Then it jogs along at a similar speed to Neptune for about 100 years. So both planets maintain the same angular relationship to each other during these long periods. Eventually Pluto returns to the part of its orbit that takes it further from the Sun than Neptune. Then it starts to move more slowly (from our viewpoint) and the angular connection between the two planets ends. That’s where we are now in this cycle, at the end of a long sextile period. Pluto is slowing down, Neptune is drawing away from Pluto. The long-lasting 60 degree angle will be broken by 2034.

There is very little written about these periods in astrological texts, possibly because this sextile aspect lasts so long and is so all-enveloping that we find it hard to stand back and look objectively at its effects. It becomes our background muzak for such long periods that we stop hearing it.

Meet the ‘new’ gods, same as the old gods

Neptune and Pluto (and Uranus) are a whole new area of study for us as these planets were only observed in the last 300 years or so. They had to wait for the invention of the telescope in the 1700s as they aren’t visible to the naked eye.

Uranus was first seen in 1781.

Neptune was found in 1846.

Pluto was definitively identified in 1930. .

So before 1781 astrologers did not take these distant planets and their long cycles into account because they didn’t know about them. Of course their influence was always felt in our world but it wasn’t recognised. This means we are still learning to consciously understand their power and symbolism. The 7 visible planets (the ones we don’t need a telescope to see) have been studied for millennia so we know a lot about how they correlate to worldly events, but we are still learning about how the three ‘new’ planets relate to our lives.

Learning about the symbolism of Neptune and Pluto.

The main way astrologers deepen our understanding of planetary symbols is by studying history and connecting events, both personal and geopolitical, to planetary cycles.

Let’s look at what we know so far about the meanings of Pluto and Neptune, first on the geopolitical level:

In ancient Greek Pluto means ‘the rich one’ because he rules the Underworld. The real material riches of this world come from under the earth. Civilisations have always been defined by what they dig out of the ground, be it salt, iron, copper, coal, oil, uranium, rare earths etc etc.

Geopolitically, Pluto is most often correlated with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s just as Pluto was first identified by telescope. However, Pluto is rarely mentioned as the symbol of the distribution of wealth at different periods, just as the economic causes of WW2 are rarely looked at. We are not taught that both WW1 and WW2 were in large part, bankers wars. Germany was deliberately bankrupted by other western powers. This was a plutonic manipulation of wealth that led to genocide.

In mythology Pluto wears a helmet of invisibility. In modern times the people who own this fabulous wealth, are part of an Underworld where huge money is handled invisibly and tax returns are a joke. The crime underworlds are part of this domain which is out of sight to most of us most of the time.

Now this formerly hidden reality is seeping out more and more, as Pluto and Neptune separate from their easy sextile, and our spiritual hopes and dreams, symbolised by Neptune, move beyond the easy reach of manipulative Plutonic messaging.

On the personal level Pluto rules deep psychological transformation and personal evolution. These processes are usually much more uncomfortable than they sound. Pluto, by sign, house and aspect, shows how we learn to go with the constant deaths and rebirths that Life requires in order to stay fresh, satisfying and meaningful. Plutos position also shows us what happens when we don’t flow with these soul-clamours for radical change. He pinpoints where the underworld might come up and carry us off. That sounds horrific but keep in mind that our fears are mostly of our own making, as Persephone discovered when she was forced to make the transition from innocent girl who thought she was protected by her mother as she gathered spring flowers, to Queen of her own underworld. The transformative realities of Pluto rape our innocence, especially our cherished innocence about how nice we think we are and how honest we think the power structures of our world are.

Sometimes Plutonic realities are way beyond our control, when big disasters hit, whether natural or manmade. How do we understand injustices like wars, genocides or mass death through earthquakes etc that affect thousands or millions of people? In these cases, there are big gaps in our astrological knowledge. Recent studies of the cycles of our Sun, thanks to more and more powerful telescopes, might be helping close these gaps.

Neptune is the astrological symbol for empathy, selflessness, divine interconnectedness, self-sacrifice, the dissolution of separateness and boundaries, bliss, dreams, nightmares, addictions, drugs, alcohol, escapism, spirituality, the oceans, oil, victims, refugees, scapegoats, gullibility, self-delusion, film, deceptive imagery and illusions, advertising, propaganda, fame, charisma, fog, clouds and romance. Take your pick! And this is nowhere near a complete list so no wonder astrology students find Neptune confusing.

when we reach for paradise and often fall flat on our egos in the attempt. Yet the brief tastes of bliss keep us trying.

When Pluto and Neptune make an “easy” aspect to each other it’s not hard to see what the negative outcomes can be. Mass manipulation via emotional appeals to our higher, kinder selves aka the weaponization of empathy, work well at these times. Mass control through overuse of drugs and the medicalization of everyday problems can be passed off as kindness, and creates unthinkable wealth from the drug industries, legal and illegal. Mass access to television and internet have been hypnotic drugs too..

The reality of this symbolism came to a crescendo in January 2020 when Pluto was strengthened by Saturn, the planet of authority, obedience and fear. Both of them were in Capricorn the sign of governments. Neptune was its own sign, Pisces where he encourages unquestioning empathy and easily demolishes boundaries. Pluto was in sextile to Neptune. That was an ‘easy’ time to inspire fear and to deceive on a mass scale. How many people took a dangerous untested drug because they were told it would ‘protect granny’? The timing of this crisis was well-chosen by the architects of covid, whether deliberately or accidentally. The Plutocracy turned our Neptunian capacity for kindness and self-sacrifice into a weapon for control and death.

The Neptune Pluto cycle

Each long Pluto-Neptune dance begins and ends with a coming together, a conjunction, of the two planets, just like every lunar month begins and ends with a New Moon which is a conjunction of the Sun and the Moon. For Neptune and Pluto this happens about once every 495 years. The most recent conjunction was in 1891-92 when Pluto and Neptune came together in the sign of Gemini.

The conjunction before that happened in 1398, when they also met in the sign of Gemini.

We’re going to start there, in 1398.

Gemini is the sign of business, trade routes, communication and media. The Neptune-Pluto conjunction in Gemini in 1398 was the first conjunction in that sign in 25,000 years approximately. Yes, it’s a long cycle! Who knows what means of communication and trade routes were innovated 25,000 years ago. We will probably never know. But we do know that Johannes Gutenberg was born around 1398 (his exact year of birth is unknown but estimated between 1396 and 1404), he who invented the printing press and began the process of making books and reading available to the masses in Europe. Before that books were few and far between and only available to people rich enough to pay a scribe for at least a years work of painstaking writing on expensive materials.

The first book Gutenberg printed en masse was the Bible. Suddenly, ordinary folk could read it without the intervention of priests. This led to the Renaissance, the Reformation and Democracy as people finally began to take their gods words into their own hands and demand that Christian values be reflected in politics, religion and society.

In 1398 we see how the conjunction began a process, a seed of innovation that gradually spread and changed the idealism (Neptune) of the masses (Pluto) via new information from books (Gemini). The influence of Gutenbergs innovation on the second millennium cannot be underestimated.

As Mark Twain put it in the 1800s: "What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg.”

By the time Neptune and Pluto began to sextile each other, about 50 or 60 years after the 1398 conjunction, printing had really taken off.

Another of the most influential early printings was Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1486, under the Neptune-Pluto sextile. Translated as the Witches Hammer this was the instructional handbook for the witch-hunts that murdered about 60 - 80,000 so-called witches over the next few hundred years. It was second in popularity only to the Bible.

The third most popular printings were astrological almanacs which made astrology available to ordinary people for the first time.

As Mark Twain said, printing brought us the good and the bad.

Like Gutenberg, Henry the Navigator was born at the conjunction in 1398. He was the patron of the Portuguese explorers who went in search of new trade routes to India and famously ended up in Africa and the Americas instead.

That “discovery” was great for the Europeans and terrible for the people already living in Africa and the Americas. This mixture of positive and negative teaches us about one of the basic qualities of the sign of Gemini where the Neptune-Pluto conjunctions will continue to take place over the few thousand years.

Gemini deals in communication. All information is equally interesting to the Geminian mindset whether its true or not. That’s why Gemini is said to be the ruler of gossip and the grapevine as well as early education and the delights of the mind. Gemini teaches us why we cannot blame words in themselves, nor the printing press nor the internet for our communications problems. These are all just tools, it is up to us to use them well. Gemini does not make moral judgements about what it learns, that’s why it rules early education when the child absorbs everything in its environment, whether it’s good for the child or not.

Finding value and meaning in information is the job of Geminis opposite sign, Sagittarius.

Sagittarius is the sign of religion and philosophy, the area where we search for deeper patterns.

Sagittarius and Gemini complement each other. The philosophical, moralistic idealism of Sagittarius and the friendly Geminian, sociable daily exchange of chit-chat are equally important to our human relationships.

The long sextile during the late medieval and early renaissance period lasted approx from 1461 to 1540. The religious wars of the Reformation movements, headed by Martin Luther and by Henry the 8th of England were in full swing then.

These movements were really land-grabs on an enormous scale that resulted in major redistributions of wealth by secular rulers who appropriated Roman Catholic lands and moneys. This time is also considered the beginning of capitalism as huge wealth passed into the hands of private owners as Church wealth was privatised. They led to the enclosures of common land.

Luther began as a sincere spiritual revolutionary helping the faithful poor against the rapacious church. In other words he was cooperating with the Neptunian side of the sextile. He ended up supporting the rich ruling princes against the same poor peasants. So you could say he switched his allegiance to Pluto.

I’m not sure if we can say anything at all complimentary about Henry 8th – maybe that he began the legalisation of divorce by chopping the heads of his wives? - but the results were the same, a radical privatisation of resources when he rejected Romes' authority in England.

This history has many similiarities to the period we are now coming to the end of. Ordinary people are discovering the depth of corruption in our leaders. The peasants i.e. us, are definitely revolting against hidden tyranny and brain-washing. The upward movement of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is mind-boggling and shows no signs of slowing down.

On to 1891-92

The most recent Neptune-Pluto conjunction, in 1891-92, took place not long after the first official sighting of Neptune in 1846. This initial sighting brought the symbolism of Neptune into our consciousness. It seems that every time one of the three outer planets was discovered, events arose that were in harmony with the symbolism of that newly-found planet.

For example: Uranus rules equality and brotherhood because he is the sky god and the sky covers us all equally. He was first seen in 1781 just before the democratic revolutions in France and America, the official beginning of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which are all Uranian concepts.

The conjunction of Neptune and Pluto in 1891-92 coincides with the years that Freud was doing the psychoanalytical research that led to publishing “The Interpretation of Dreams”. This book led to a new perception of the human subconscious. Like Gutenbergs bible printings its influence cannot be underestimated. The strange thing is that very few of us have ever read it. We didn’t need to, because in the same year as the conjunction of Neptune and Pluto, 1891, Edward Bernay, Freuds infamous nephew, was born. Bernay first used his uncles work to successfully propagandise the US public to accept involvement in WW1 in spite of the original US determination to stay out of foreign wars. The planet is still being destroyed today by that change in policy

I recommend reading about Bernays work online, it is quite shocking. WW1 was just the beginning of it. Freuds work would not have had such influence without him. Bernay skillfully re-interpreted our Neptunian dreams to make us believe we wanted whatever would give more power and money to the Plutocrats.

Neptune rules the dissolution of boundaries as he rules the boundless oceans. Freuds work began the blurring of boundaries between conscious and subconscious. We may love him or hate him but his influence remains indisputable. His work changed forever how we see reality.

At the same time, physical boundaries were changing through travel and media innovations. Radio, telephone and the combustion engine altered our concepts of time and distance forever. Photography began an even more complex transformation on our minds, as the subconscious works through imagery above all else. Try to imagine a world with no photos. It’s very difficult, isn’t it? Yet before the invention of the camera the only images were religious art and portraits, usually of the rich and powerful. Ordinary people had no such records. Now we do, and it has changed how we view our lives. We are much more self-conscious, for better and for worse.

So we can see in the last decade of the 1800s the beginnings of the 20th century. When this latest Neptune–Pluto cycle began in the sign of Gemini it ushered in the modern techno age that changed forever how we communicate with each other.

By the time Neptune and Pluto had come to their sextile aspects (remember, a sextile is 60 degrees and supposedly “easy”) in the early 1940s the Information Age was well under way. The study of Cybernetics was to be the foundation of A.I. and Large Language Models like ChatGBT etc. If you are puzzled by what Cybernetics means, just remember its original Greek meaning – the Art of Helmsmanship. Anyone who has steered a boat will know that the slightest adjustment in the angle of the helm can radically change the boats course over time. The word was used in Ancient Greece to mean the Art of Governance. In the 1940s it started to mean the control and manipulation of society.

Pluto rises in our consciousness.

Pluto was first identified as a planet in 1930 as Hitler rose to power in Germany. Exactly at that time mass psychology exploded into war and politics, thanks in great part to Freuds nephew, Bernay. He later publicly regretted that his work was used to facilitate the Holocaust.

Even more effectively than the Third Reich, Hollywood has spread its extremely attractive, righteous, moral supremacist version of the US around the world via the cinema industry. And we all gobble it up eagerly even if our lives are being destroyed by the violence of the US empire. In fact it seems that the poorer the audience the more they love Hollywood. We could ascribe that to the escapist, addictive facet of Neptune.

This wildly successful campaign of propaganda in the guise of entertainment plus the poison of McDonalds, Coca Cola etc, often pushed by the same media, plus the cinematic normalization, even the romanticization, of extreme cruelty and mass killings has deeply affected our minds and bodies. We’re suffering from mass PTSD.

The new powers of mass manipulation that grew by quantum leaps at the time Pluto was identified were aided by his very agreeable sextile relationship with Neptune the ruler of images, illusions, propaganda, photography and deception. The easy flow of energy between Neptune and Pluto during the last 80 years has strengthened Neptunes power to deceive.

It is also true that since Neptune and Pluto moved into the easy sextile part of their dance after WW2, life has become easier for many people. Unless you happen to live in the Asian and African countries which have been destroyed by war. But this time of ease allows most of us to skip over that. We happily live on our screens and life has become less real.

This is comfortable and comforting to a great degree, but it is unlikely to last.

We move out of the sextile in the early 2030s. Waking up from this long dream will be interesting, uncomfortable and shocking and ultimately a great relief.

Since writing the above the Israeli-US war on Iran has already begun the process of shocking us into awareness via the prices at the petrol pump. Now, no matter how hard we try to stick our heads in the sand the lying nature of western warmongering governments has become impossible to ignore. Now we can’t un-see the naked cruelty behind the plutocratic propaganda that’s been running our perceptions for the last 80 years.

Summing up

Since the outer planets were discovered, beginning in 1781 with Uranus, we have taken onto ourselves the power of gods. Uranus was a cold distant god who treated his wife, Gaia, very badly until she revolted and organised a bad end for him.

Astrology says Uranus is the ruler of new technologies because around the time of Uranus’ discovery, the first precision lathes were made in France. This allowed the creation of industrial machinery. We have been on a roller-coaster of technical power ever since, with little regard for Gaias suffering.

There’s no argument that our inventions also have extremely positive aspects that are truly transformative. China lifted half a billion people out of poverty in less than 20 years through industrializing. (I will write about Chinas chart soon, it’s very Uranian as might be expected).

The internet has been a game-changer, opening our minds as well as messing with them.

Since 1398 we are in a super-Gemini period when information has gradually become an end in itself. Geminis’ delight in learning new facts, whether they have meaning or whether they are true or false, pretty well describes a lot of the digital world.

Luckily for us, this sextile is breaking up just as the age of sophisticated AI is coming in. Hopefully, as it fades, it will make it harder to pull the Neptunian wool of AI over our eyes. We are developing a much sharper discernment between human and non-human media. This is probably particularly true of the younger generations. Those born in the 2030s, when the sextile aspect is finally over, will probably look back in shock and horror at how gullible their parents and grandparents were about the media and education.

Sagittarius, the truth teller who searches for higher meaning, is our antidote to excess Gemini. We are already in an intensive course as we learn to tell the difference between easily available but pointless information and hard-won meaningful truth.

Positive Neptune and Pluto

This article has mainly explored the negatives of the Pluto and Neptune sextile. Let’s end with the positive aspects which are many, you’ll be glad to hear if you got this far in my astrological tale of woe!

Many countries instituted Social Welfare during the Pluto-sextile-Neptune decades. This system aspires to redistribute wealth more equally based on humanitarian empathy. It has made a big difference when it functions properly. You only have to compare countries that don’t have a social safety net with those that do. By no means does it work perfectly but the political and social aspirations of this aspect are what we are looking at here, a redistribution of wealth that recognises that we all deserve the means to live decently.

Neptune is a transcendent, sacrificial energy, that encourages us to go beyond our selfish boundaries, to put the greater good first. It was first seen in 1846 the year that Marx and Engels wrote the pamphlet that became known as the Communist Manifesto. It was the spread of the Communist movement that forced capitalist states, a century later, to create social welfare systems and allow trade unions to exist as a preferred alternative to communism-inspired revolution, which would have destroyed private wealth.

Neptune works by seeping imperceptibly into our souls. Jesus was the first symbol of the Neptunian Age of Pisces (approx 0 CE to the present) Whether you believe he existed or not, the story of his Neptunian self-sacrifice to save humanity and his teachings of love-thy-neighbour-as-thyself have never waned in popularity and have marked the last 2,000 years possibly like nothing else.

Democracy attempted to create a political system based on the tenets of brotherly love and freedom for all. Communism is a secular, economic version of the same ideals, that we are all created equal. Both are Neptunian dreams that seem to be impossible to materialize, Yet we can’t stop trying or we lose the milk of human kindness.

Pluto rules radical, ruthless truth -seeking, how we face the unfaceable. It shows how we use the material world to try to avoid our fear of death, by amassing wealth and power, or more sensibly, by sharing it, because a shroud has no pockets.

Jesus reportedly said that that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to access the Kingdom of Heaven. I found that proverb very puzzling until I began to study Pluto: no-one arrives in the next world with a big bank account.

Pluto is the modern ruler of Scorpio. The opposite and complementary sign to Scorpio is Taurus. Taurus is ruled by Venus, the beautiful goddess, symbol of our earthly pleasures. Pluto does not forbid us the sensual enjoyment of comfort and beauty, he only insists that at times we have to let it go and move on.

These recent decades (and still 8 years to go at the time of writing) of the Pluto-Neptune sextile certainly been a time of deceit and secrets. We’ve swallowed the illusion that we can have it all, always. But in the end, no-one can win an argument with Pluto.

The US war on Iran which started 28th Feb 2026 is about who wields the Plutonic power and riches attached to Neptunian oil (remember Neptune rules liquids, gases and chemicals). Once again Pluto is insisting we let go and lose our illusions of comfort that cheap oil gives us. Would we kill a child in order to drive our cars or flick the light switch? Most of us wouldn’t. Yet that that’s the deadly reality behind our present illusion of ease.