Is It Good or Bad and What Does it Mean?

After the last post on Neptune moving into Pisces, I received the above questions, which I'd like to address now.  As Marcus Aurelius says from the First Century, the universe is made of one substance.  It is only our dualistic mind that wants to see things in good or bad, black or white, mind or body, rich or poor.  It is easier for the mind to divide things and make sense of the parts, rather than seeing the whole.   Science and medicine do this all the time.  We have an illness. Modern medicine tends to treat a body ailment either with specific drugs targeted to that symptom, or by replacing the diseased organ with a new one, as if the body were a machine, instead of seeing the body as a whole and treating body, mind and spirit as one.

When I was at Hunter in 1967, I had a philosophy professor who asked the class if the world was many things or one thing.  Most of the class, including myself, answered many of course.  Yet the early Greek and Roman philosophers knew differently, and the 60's were beginning to bring that fact back to cultural consciousness.  Another sociology professor gave me Herman Hesse's book Siddartha, cautioning me that she was not sure she should, indeed I left Hunter and NYC soon after that in the middle of winter for an alternative lifestyle in a log cabin in Vermont.

It is not good or bad that Neptune is moving into Pisces for 14 years.  It just is. The meaning of it is up to us to assign.  Astrology marks passages and cycles of time and can be quite helpful  in assigning meaning.   When we talk astrology and what the planets are doing, all we can do is take note of what transpired when Neptune was in Pisces previously.

1520-34 saw the Protestant Reformation spread across Europe, Henry VIII established the Church of England and dissolved the monasteries, Magellan circumnavigated the globe, Spanish invaders collapsed the Aztec, Inca and Mayan civilizations.  1685-99 saw the Salem witchcraft trials and the apparition of Our Lady in Lourdes. 1848-63 saw the rise of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species, the Opium Wars with China, the stress that the continuation of slavery was bringing to the country,  the start of the Civil War, the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, Louis Pasteur's discovery of the existence of bacteria and the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. (for further elucidation see The Mountain Astrologer magazine Dec/Jan 2012 edition).

All the above events( taken from all the events in the periods) conform to the symbolism of the combination  of Neptune and Pisces which time period we have entered again.  The common themes of all the previous periods are water, spreading, dissolving, idealizing, the banishment of one way of life, the blending of the imaginary and the real world and the appearance of the previously unseen.  There is not just one influence occurring at a time of course, and nothing ever repeats exactly; no moment in time is like an other, but we can imagine what could happen knowing what happened before.  Imagining what will happen does not give us any answers to whether this passage is good or bad or assign any meaning, for that is completely up to the individual and his perspective.