Neptune

Meaning

Neptune is the outermost of the eight planets and invisible to the naked eye. It takes about 165 years to go round the zodiac, roughly fourteen years in each sign, and is retrograde for a little over five months a year: no one lives through a whole cycle.

Astrologers read it as imagination, ideals, compassion and the longing for something beyond everyday life, found in music, art, faith, dreams or a sense of oneness. The same dissolving quality can blur outlines, so it also describes confusion, illusion, escape, and the wish to be rescued or to rescue.

Its sign marks a generation; its house and close aspects carry the personal meaning. Modern astrologers make it the ruler of Pisces beside Jupiter, the sign’s traditional ruler. Tradition, which never knew it, gives it no dignity.

Its gifts are empathy, inspiration and a feeling for what cannot be seen. Its difficulties are vagueness, idealising people or causes, and losing oneself in others or in ways of escape.

In practice

• Its house shows where life asks for faith and where clear outlines blur: in the 12th, solitude, music or an inner life; in the 10th, a vocation in art or care, or several changes of direction.
• Aspects to the personal planets, especially the Moon and Venus, are read as a heightened sensitivity, someone who feels what others feel.
• Its transits last two years or more, bring uncertainty or inspiration to what they touch, and reward patience more than quick decisions.
• Neptune squares its birth place in the early forties, a transit often read with Uranus’s opposition as part of the questions of midlife.

Across traditions

• Traditional astrology, Western, Indian and Chinese, never used it: it cannot be seen without a telescope.
• Chinese now calls it 海王星 Hǎiwángxīng, the Sea King star, after its Western name.
• Human Design counts it among its thirteen bodies: Neptune is the veil, a theme hard to see clearly in oneself, where illusion and inspiration mix.

Origin and history

Galileo noted it beside Jupiter in late 1612 and early 1613 and took it for a fixed star. In the 1840s Urbain Le Verrier in Paris, and independently John Couch Adams in England, calculated where an unseen planet had to be to explain the irregularities in Uranus’s motion; on 23 September 1846 Johann Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest found it in Berlin, within about a degree of Le Verrier’s position. It was named after the Roman god of the sea, and in July 2011 it completed its first full orbit since its discovery. Astrologers gave it Pisces, and psychological astrology, as in Liz Greene’s study of 1996, explored it as the longing for redemption.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Neptune from the Swiss Ephemeris (DE441): its apparent position seen from the centre of the Earth, in the tropical zodiac. It is marked retrograde when its daily motion runs backwards and stationary within about seven days of a station.

Ulune’s dignity tables keep to the seven traditional planets, so Neptune has no score; with Pisces rising, Ulune names it as the modern chart ruler beside Jupiter. Within 8° of the Sun it is marked combust, as every planet is in Ulune, a notion tradition kept for the visible planets. The calendar dates its stations, sign changes and exact transits, with the whole span each transit stays within a degree.