Will the veil be lifted allowing us to see into an alternative reality? Or will we pulled further into the madness of an increasingly chaotic world? The Lunar Eclipse at 15 degrees Aquarius/Leo next Monday August 7th sits exactly on the Neptune/Pluto midpoint, which can offer sixth-sense awareness or manic instability. Dion Fortune, a notable White Magician, neatly paraphrased the fine line between the two, writing about ‘those strange byways of the mind that the psychic shares with the psychotic.’
Pluto’s domain in astrological terms is the deep, dark realm of wealth, sex, death and rebirth, power and control. It has a Scorpionic intensity, a need to plumb the depths to find the heights of transcendence.
Neptune’s realm also has a double-faceted quality – revenge and cruelty often sit side by side with extreme compassion, great creativity and strong religious yearnings. Financial and other scandals always have a whiff of Neptune about them, with its quality of deceptiveness and its persuasive sleights of hand. Confidence tricks come under Neptune’s banner, with its inability to set boundaries or to distinguish between thine and mine, and its tendency to lie and distort.
Neptune and Pluto together create a fey, mystical mix of energies, both wonderful and terrifying at the same time. Historically the combination is connected with the rise of great powers with epically brutal leaders; with art, especially erotic literature; with scientific advances in such intangibles as electricity, radio and telephone; with religious events; and with scandals.
Neptune in its visionary aspect, mixing with Pluto’s power drive, creates a delusional though often devastatingly effective megalomania. Neptune puts the dream above reality, writes off human sacrifice as a necessary cost to gain the end. Pluto as the arch controller reduces individual humans to objects, pawns on the chessboard; the puppetmaster reigns supreme.
Ebertin talks of the Neptune/Pluto midpoint as a purified soul-life and clairvoyant visions OR frauds, falsehoods, utter confusion, obsessions, addictions. It’s a delicate balance.
Dion Fortune herself was born with the Neptune Pluto conjunction in Gemini of 1894 opposing her Sun. Hitler who dabbled in black magic to fuel his megalomania had a Neptune Pluto conjunction in his access-to-other-realms, power-hungry 8th house. The ISIS 2006 chart has its Sun (Venus Mars) square its Neptune/Pluto midpoint. The UK’s Capricorn Sun sits exactly on its Neptune/Pluto midpoint, which in its ‘glory days’ led to colonial over-reach with an empire on which the sun never set.
It’s a powerful energy which can rise to great heights and, when the coin flips, its hubris, arrogance and sense of divine entitlement bring it crashing down.
The individual’s answer as ever to such heady energy is: 1. Grounding, stay rooted in the body (exercise, eat healthily, don’t over drink/drug); 2. Common sense and rationality. Keep in mind that the Solar Eclipse of August 21st is in a Saros series which warns of distorted and false information. Not all hunches and presentiments will be accurate, worries will magnify out of proportion and most will prove to have been a waste of nervous energy. Be like the Ladakhis – happy despite problems. There’s the additional surge of super-confident energy leading to over-reach of the Jupiter square Pluto on Friday 4th. It tends to bring out pride, wilfulness and a dogmatic streak which brushes social niceties to one side and fosters a law unto itself attitude. Tr Pluto is exactly square Trump’s natal Jupiter with his Jupiter Return – so unlikely to induce moderation or manners.
Thanks Marjorie for the good advice trying the self publishing myself .
I’m traditionally published in the UK. I write A slice of life books which err on the dark plutonic side… I have pluto in the first…it’s hard work and no guarantees if success. Publishing has changed since Saturn was last in Sagittarius ..the Wapping dispute and Eddie Shah … We are in a new revolution of self publishing which requires collaboration of authors with their publishers. Oh and I have Neptune in Scorpio in the third
Angelena, do you find that your 3rd House Neptune is good for a rich imagination but bad for academia? I’ve got it in Sagittarius; crazy inner world which is good for writing but, I found the academic side when doing my degree very hard going. I almost couldn’t break down the bigger picture, which is a talent you need when turning in essays!
Hi Jo
Absolutely. I used to day dream at university and struggled to write in an academic style. Now I find writing fiction easy.. just flows.
I live in a world of my own making. Useful at times like this!
August has a good-for-starting-new-projects Mars sextile Jupiter on the 20th but that’s the day before the Solar Eclipse, and Mercury is retrograde till Sept 5. Neptune oppositions to Sun and Mars bookend September; and Mercury on the 20th – so all kind of swampy.
October is blocked until mid month really – Mars Pluto, Sun Pluto and Mars Saturn.
The latter days of October Jupiter in Scorpio is under way conjunct the Sun on the 26th and that suits my chart with a Libra Ascendant as Mars is coming out of hiding. So on the broad sweep not great to launch before mid October – and then depending on your individual chart.
Some books/projects are slow burn but if the initial chart is difficult, it doesn’t help. My Astrological History of the World had an appalling ‘signing’ chart – Sun, Pluto, Venus and retrograde Mercury in the 8th. It lurched through one publishers’ bankruptcy, plans for an illustrated coffee table which got shelved (after I’d done all the research), crawled through the buy-out publishers schedule. And then they didn’t publicise it. It is a very peculiar business.
It’s why I decided on the self-publish route having ground my teeth through the write-perfect-pitch/synopsis routine for agents, who then have to find a publisher, who then take three years to get it out, don’t do any publicity and pay you miniscule amounts. It’s a mammoth obstacle course and frankly they’ve no idea what they want and what to do with it when they get it. That’s my gripe for the day. But I’ve worked in television, newspapers and magazines and none of them were half as crazy as book publishing.
The only thing about self-publishing is you have to market hard and consistently otherwise that doesn’t work either.
Thanks for this Marjorie 🙂 Yes, I think traditional publishing is a dinosaur that is rapidly dying out and they do what you can do yourself (I didn’t even know that you still have to market the book yourself if you go the traditional route – Which makes their profit margins hard to digest. Then, flick peanuts back at you after you have done all the hard work!). So, why not do it yourself and get a bigger slice of the pie?
Jo, To be honest I don’t think their profit margins are that good since they have to pay editors, copy editors and proof readers, graphic cover designers, techs to format it for print setting, pay printer, shipping costs, sometimes translators, etc etc, plus the author’s slice from which the agent gets a percentage. Then it sells 600 copies. The very few they do market with adverts and book tours do make money but their losses on 98% plus of what they publish, if not more, must be astronomical. It’s a very bloated market and all these creative writing courses which dangle JK Rowling, Paula Hawkins, Ian Rankin under people’s noses are fairly misleading.
Not too many make a success of self-publishing but if you can get it going and do Amazon E exclusively on digital then they give you 70% of the selling price. And print on demand which is marginally more complicated also gives a chunkier percentage – if you can sell them. But it’s a fairly big IF. Still we travel hopefully.
Wonderful advice! I’ve been scribbling sci fi short stories for years, never published anything. I’d initially target the sci fi rags on the news stands but that mode may not be suitable any longer. Still, I refine and tweek the plots and wording until I see the emotional content I desire. There are a couple of established sci fi authors which I try to emulate, in terms of character development.
Thanks as always Marjorie for your astrological wisdom and advice. Just checking when you say late October – from when to when should be the best time to consider?
I only ask because I am looking to launch a gemstone jewellery/homeware website and things seems to be going veeeery slow. Just before coming unto your site I was thinking to email the person going to do the work to query why responses take so long and register my frustration. Now, upon reading your advice above I am wondering whether it is as it should be and don’t rush as it gives me more time. October sounds good but what does that window look like?
Thanks again, All the best j
Oh I’d tell him and then you can say ‘told you so’ when it goes wrong. Maybe that’s a Virgo thought. I wouldn’t launch on an Lunar Eclipse, though the Jupiter Pluto square will help. Depends partly what’s showing on his chart. No not really on second thoughts. I would avoid this month altogether frankly. And September is mushy – two major Neptune oppositions. I’m about to sail a crime thriller out into the universe and decided late October was the earliest it looked propitious.
Thanks, Marjorie 🙂
My brother is a Libran but has a packed 8th house and is uber-Plutonic. He wrote a fantasy novel recently and asked my advice on how he should go about publishing. I told him if he were to go the publishing route his novel would probably get turned down and digital publishing is the way to go because his 40k book is considered too small for the genre on the traditional platform. So, typical rail-road Pluto style, he said I was wrong and submitted to dozens of publishers and got turned down by everyone. Now, he’s planning next week to launch digitally. I’ll certainly mention the current astrology but, he’ll ignore the warning and when it goes wrong, will blame everyone else! He’s a sod for that type of behaviour.
I too have got some titles out (though not making money right now – only published a fortnight ago – now wondering if it was a good idea considering these dark astro forces in the current), but, I have some projects that would have also been ready within the next 2-3 weeks. Think, I’ll keep my down, keep writing and hang fire as well and do the Virgo thing of planning a course of intelligent practicality, lol.
I’ve a prominent Neptune in my chart (Singleton & T-square w/Jupiter & Venus, inc. a Sun opp. Jupiter) and I can certainly attest to that annoying daydreaming quality but, strangely, I’ve been quite focused and determined with my writing these few months. I’m hoping with all these Neptune coming up I don’t dissolve into apathy. It’s nice to actually have something to show for when I drift in a bubble on a regular basis! Just thought, if you publish under these lunar type conditions or any murky soup aspects, can you relaunch under a different set of aspects or has the astro template already been set?
Good luck with the book launch, by the way!
In my experience, Libran siblings will ask for your advice and then do the opposite of whatever you say. I’d have just said that the publisher route is a brilliant idea and why on earth is he even considering digital, saves time 😉
Thanks for the steer Marjorie.
All the best
Hi Marjorie, my brother is planning on launching his self-publishing business next week under this eclipse. Would it be a good idea to hold off until it’s passed? Mind you, I imagine if I told him to hold back under astrological terms he’d probably tell me where to go, :D, as he’s pretty headstrong!