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Neptune and Pluto: Blending of the Ultimate Polarity

by Bill Streett

In one of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s many meditations on war and violence, Full Metal Jacket captures the full absurdity and horror of war. One of Kubrick’s trademark devices employed to illuminate the irrational elements of humanity was seen in a particularly dark brand of satire, typically comprised of the juxtaposing of the reasonable and rational elements of humanity pitted against the darker, more mysterious, and cruel facets of humanity. Kubrick’s penetrating wit not only amplified the darker and shadowy aspects of humanity but, through contrasting the dark side with our more reasonable or elevated natures, Kubrick often shocked us into just how irrational and absurd we can be at times. This penetrating example from Full Metal Jacket shows Kubrick’s playful, dark satire at work:

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Joker (as portrayed by Matthew Modine): A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where did you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to Kill,” sir.
Colonel: You write “Born to Kill” on your helmet, and you wear a
peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick
joke?
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of
man, sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir.

In the midst of war, private Joker has both the courage and somewhat naïve audacity to comment on the absurd nature of humanity, displaying symbols that contrast the lower and higher nature of the human condition. The colonel, symbolizing a one-sided yet seasoned warrior, neither displays the patience nor reflectiveness to comprehend the commentary by the upstart private.

Private Joker suggests to the colonel that he is commenting on the dual nature of man, unpacking with hesitation the ironic juxtaposition of signs on his uniform. The duality of human nature is found all around us, in gender, in socio-economic class, in temperament, in age, and in vocation. However, private Joker was commenting on what might be considered the ultimate duality—the clash between spirit and nature, the division between our higher and lower selves, the split between our inner angels and our demons. When juxtaposed, they do elicit an impossible enigma and irresolvable riddle: how can it be that human nature has the capacity to touch something transcendent and divine while also being responsible for the most murderous aggression, the most heinous atrocities, and the most despicable violations against reason?

In astrology, this dichotomy is brilliantly illuminated through the pairing of Neptune and Pluto, the two outer planets that capture this ultimate dualism in human nature. In a stunning manner, the planetary archetypes capture fundamental dualities as one progresses through the solar system. That is, the sequence of planetary symbols, from the Sun to the outermost planet, Pluto, form natural dichotomies reflective of the tensions inherent within being human. The Sun and Moon symbolize the most personal and individual response to one’s striving, egoic will, typically identified as masculine in nature, to the more subjective, relational, and nurturing tendencies in one’s self, symbolized by the feminine Moon. This type of dichotomy is stretched throughout the solar system until one finally arrives at Neptune and Pluto.

Private Joker’s juxtaposition of “born to kill” and the peace symbol represent the Pluto-Neptune polarity. Pluto is often affiliated with nature; however, that connection can often be misleading, for what do we mean by nature? In this instance, we do not mean natural, as in organic, or nature, as in taking a hike in the wilderness. Rather, “nature,” in the manner that is connected with Pluto, connects us to the instinctual, the primal, the animalistic. Pluto symbolizes the part of nature that is evolutionary in trajectory, yet this trajectory has a peculiar quality to it. In order for evolution to advance, old forms do not simply wither away or graciously allow for a new form to evolve. Instead, this advance is chaotic, destructive, extreme, and unyielding. Pluto is often associated with the big three: sex, death, and transformation, that is, the churning wheels of evolution that keep the entire show of life going. Like an unrelenting, driving mulching machine, Pluto keeps the whole show of life evolving onward—unapologetically and without remorse. All of us are soldiers like private Joker, “born to kill;” at the root of our beings is found a great impetus toward creation and destruction that impels the whole of humanity.

Freud, as highly attuned to this particular dimension of the human psyche as he was, identified the typical ways in which we manage and cope with this extraordinary force in our lives, for if we were to be in touch and act out this facet of the psyche at all times, life would simply be a horrific, barbaric terror show where the will to dominate and destroy would reign entirely supreme. Freud’s defense mechanisms typically demonstrate how we supervise the constant push that is symbolized by the astrological Pluto: repression, intellectualization, reaction formation, and omnipotent control all represent strategies of dealing with the constant bombardment of the Plutonic element in the individual psyche.

Pluto puts the stiletto in the high heel. Pluto puts the distortion and power in the amplified rock guitar. Pluto compels greater and more sophisticated technology in the art of war. Pluto places the scintillating reptilian undertones in the enunciation of the word, “sex.” Pluto is often a highly-charged, dynamic, and powerful territory; however, much of its power is derived from its implicit force as much as it is from the power that is given to it by collective repression and taboos, for it is when the force is tucked and shoved deeper into the recesses of the collective unconscious that it is given even greater and more power.

We might say that Neptune represents an entirely different side of nature. Neptune is our ability to connect with something far greater than ourselves through the identification of something infinite, cosmic, or transcendental. Thus, Neptune can also connote “nature” but in the sense of connecting with everything around ourselves—a deeply spiritual communion with the movement of spirit through meditation, prayer, or divine offering. Thus, “nature,” in the Neptunian realm is more the province of a nature mystic.

Kubrick’s Joker displayed the Neptunian dimension through his peace symbol—a highly emotional icon that represents our highest dreams, a return to an ideal condition, and a world of beauty, joy, and unity. The Neptunian subpersonality may be the poet in a harsh and cruel world, the dreamer in a pragmatic and cold reality, or the hopeless romantic in a world that demands realistic expectations. However, the Neptunian dimension is also a symbol that is extraordinarily evocative and powerful in its own right. Accessed primarily through the use of the human imagination, Neptune allows us to revision our entire world and continually replenishes the world through meaning. Neptune represents a connection to a divine source, and the development of higher capacities of human being. Grounding and forging the Neptunian dimension into this reality evokes the most profoundly emotional and blissful responses in our lives.

Pluto and Neptune, then, symbolize the foundational, or ultimate, dichotomy in humanity. Although we may trivialize or make light of this eternal dilemma through cartoons depicting angels and devils upon our shoulders, during major Pluto and Neptune transits, we no longer see the trivialities of this fundamental dichotomy—they become very, very real. From transiting Neptune’s perspective, the dark of the world is merely a product of wrong thought, the lower rungs of consciousness that need to be redeemed. From transiting Pluto’s perspective, Neptune’s visions and ideals are hopelessly naïve, illusory, and unfounded. Neither position is correct in isolation but rather represents two sides of the most profound dichotomy interwoven into the evolutionary journey.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans: The Fusion of Neptune and Pluto

In order to more fully comprehend the fundamental archetypal symbolism of Neptune and Pluto, it is important to understand the work of religious scholar, Rudolf Otto. More than conduct dry and analytical research in religion, Otto’s pioneering contributions involve the more subjective, psychological, and experiential aspects of religion. Otto employed the term, “numinous” to capture the psychological dimensions of religious experience. For Otto, a numinous experience was a highly charged, nonrational subjective state. Different than our conceptual and rational understanding of God or the holy, a numinous experience is more direct, more visceral, and more subjective.

Otto was somewhat of a cartographer of the religious experience. He suggested that a numinous experience must be powerful, gripping, and inspiring. A numinous experience might be what is currently called a transpersonal experience, for typically experiences that are numinous in quality put our individual and mundane lives up against that which is profoundly greater, wholly different, and beyond typical experience. Thus, numinous experiences are transpersonal in the sense that they evoke qualities that are significantly beyond and greater than our daily experience of life. Beyond this, Otto suggested that numinous experiences are typically evocative of something that is mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating, captured in the Latin phrase, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. In the grip of a numinous, or transpersonal experience, our individual ego may feel dwarfed by something that is so profoundly greater and inspiring that the experience of ourselves and the world henceforth is irrevocably changed.

As transpersonal planets, Neptune and Pluto represent dimensions of the numinous experience. As the final gatekeepers into the unknown and the unknowable, Neptune and Pluto are archetypes that give us a glimpse into something that we might call god, the divine, or spirit. As the archetypes themselves cannot be fully understood and known, they can be experienced, and a combination of Neptune and Pluto in experiential terms is mysterious, fascinating, and tremendous. Taken as a fusion, Neptune and Pluto can bring individuals and societies in touch with something much more profound and, indeed, numinous than one’s daily experience.

Only once in the last five hundred years have Neptune and Pluto formed a conjunction in the solar system. Due to the arduously slow movements of these planets, a conjunction between these planets is a rare event. Given an orb of approximately twelve to fifteen degrees, Neptune and Pluto formed a conjunction for twenty years, from 1882 to 1902. Cultural historians often note that the period from roughly 1880 to 1914 was a time of remarkable and rapid change in Western societies; it was the birth of Modernism. Undermining and subversive and yet creative and triumphant, this roughly thirty-five-year span forged an entirely new set of circumstances for cultures on either side of the Atlantic. Regardless of what facet of cultural history one focuses on—economic, political, artistic, intellectual, or social—this time period was one of extreme and dynamic change—much greater than our own time. From an astrological perspective, this period was so evolutionary and highly dynamic because three major outerplanetary alignments—a Neptune-Pluto conjunction, a Uranus-Pluto opposition, and a Uranus-Neptune opposition—all occurred in quick, overlapping succession. These powerful alignments correlated precisely with the exciting and tremendous spirit of the times.(1)

If concentrating solely on the conjunction of Pluto and Neptune, we can see that both the prevailing atmosphere, or zeitgeist, and the legacy of the last two decades of the nineteenth century were thoroughly a blending of the archetypes of Pluto and Neptune. It was as if the culture at this time was thoroughly infused with a sense of the numinous, fascinated and in awe of the fundamental mystery of life. As in the case of all planetary conjunctions, the archetypes tend ignite each other’s meanings and dimensions in potent way, but there is also the sense in which the archetypes blend together, creating a whole greater than the sum of their parts. This is certainly the case with the conjunction of Pluto and Neptune. Given Pluto’s radical and extreme evolutionary push, it both created and destroyed affiliations with Neptune’s symbolism: consciousness itself, subjectivity, the sense of the religious and transcendent, the desire for altered states of consciousness, imagery and image-making processes of the psyche.

In a manner that is difficult to express, Neptune may also be conceived as a collective consciousness—the flotsam and jetsam of moods, perceptions, atmospheres, and images that permeate our lived experience. This web of atmosphere that Neptune symbolizes is given expression primarily through cultural productions: art, music, fashion, décor, design, and aesthetics. Given this elusive, yet easily intuited, cultural vapor and collective mist we might associate with Neptune, during the conjunction of Neptune and Pluto in the late nineteenth century, Neptune thoroughly enshrouded Pluto’s symbolism so that the collective mood and cultural subjectivity was abounding with Pluto’s affiliations: the erotic, the underworld, the demonic, the taboo, and the debauched. Thus, during this pivotal time in our collective history, Pluto was “in the air,” swimming in the subjective experience of something analogous to the collective imagination. Although the Plutonian dimension made its presence felt in the collective at this time, it was nonetheless inflected by (and in some sense fused with) the archetypal Neptune. Thus, the typically powerful, obliterating, and tremendous force we affiliate with Pluto was rarefied and sublimated by Neptune’s ethereal and illusive manifestations. When Pluto aspects the outer three planets in a significant way, the collective cultural milieu changes—this is without question. However, the transformative and destructive energy associated with Pluto work on levels of consciousness that are less tangible and less concrete when connected with Neptune. Hence, the tremendous changes that did occur under this Neptune-Pluto conjunction touched the collective psyche and collective mood—felt rather than easily witnessed. (2)

The following represents a small sampling of arbitrary divisions of culture that were profoundly affected during the Pluto-Neptune conjunction of 1882—1902.

The Arts:

The fin de siecle mood of Europe captured the artist at his most passionate, most inspired, most creative, and most stirred. If we assume that it is the artist’s challenge to translate the zeitgeist for the masses, then the artist living at this time had quite an extraordinary palette and reservoir from which to draw. This was the era of the mad artist, so caught up in the excesses, ecstasy, and fanaticism of the times that it literally drove many individuals over the edge. One need only think of the disturbed act of Van Gogh cutting off his ear, Toulouse-Lautrec’s institutionalization for alcoholism, the troubled and stormy romance between Rodin and Camille Claudel, and the general debauched bohemianism that seized artists, musicians, and poets across continental Europe at this time.

Specifically within painting, we can observe the Neptune-Pluto gestalt in at least three ways: a hyper-intensification of image through color and symbolism; the concentration upon the themes of primitivism, sex, death, and decay; and the general breakdown of formalized rules in art. Without any sort of education in art history whatsoever, anyone who surveys painting of the last two decades of the nineteenth century will respond with the reaction that colors had a more vivid, intense, and primary look to them. One must only conjure up the evocations of Van Gogh’s landscapes, Rousseau’s folk art, or Munch’s early expressionism to realize that the employment of color was undeniably intensified at this point in history, radically so. Without much sophisticated analysis, we can simply observe that on an archetypal level, this is due to Pluto driving the Neptunian association with image to an extreme degree. With tremendous, intense force, Pluto was pushing on Neptune’s archetypal dominants to a heightened and incredible degree. Moreover, mythology and symbol predominated the arts at this time, from the love of Greco-Roman mythology to the employment of fantasy and the sublime. Obviously, the movement of symbolism which rose to prominence at this time was overtly suggestive of this trend.

The vivification of color and symbol at this time is indicative of Pluto engaging the realm of Neptune; however, we can observe how Plutonian themes were thoroughly mythologized and rendered sublime in the subjective field of collective experience, ensconced within Neptune’s archetypal matrix. Four of Pluto’s archetypal associations—primitivism (or primalism), sex, death, and decadence—appeared to permeate artistic themes at this time. Through the art of Gauguin and Rousseau, there was a repeated motif of mythologizing the primitive and primal aspects of our nature. With Gauguin’s near-obsession with portraying Tahitian natives and Rousseau’s concentration on nature and wildness, these artists typified a general trend at this time to recover the archaic, to delve deeply into the primordial past. Although art historian Carol Strickland reserved the term “jungles of the imagination” strictly for Rousseau, the term could be applied to any number of artists working during this period in history. (3) More than one archetype influencing another, in the case of the primitivism that rose at this time, we observe a clear case of the planetary symbolism fusing together as one, forming a true gestalt. For, as illustrated in the case of Gauguin and Rousseau, their art represented a synthesis of an idealized, if not naïve, return to innocence merged with the primal and archaic. For both artists, the state of nature symbolized a long lost pristine state, a condition of purity and beauty. Thus, we see in these artists, the expression of synthesizing the manifestations of Pluto and Neptune as one. In this instance, Neptune has stripped the primal condition, as expressed by Pluto, of all its terror, barbarism, and territorial imperative and instead has infused this state with a sort of sentimental image of paradise.

We can observe more unrefined expressions of the Plutonic at this time through the preoccupation of sex and death. As dual sides of eros, sex and death are the most identifiable expressions of Pluto, and certainly during the end of the 19th century, these themes dominated the arts. Going beyond the rather staid and refined aesthetics of the impressionists, the post-impressionists broke down the taboos of expressions of nudity and sexuality and portrayed this arena with a greater frankness and starkness than ever before in art history. Lacking prudishness or formalized stylization, the nude and sexuality at this time was given a much more honest, if not graphic, appraisal. Death, too, was not only a major motif in art at this time, but portrayed in a highly mythologized way. In artists such as James Ensor and Gustav Klimt, death received a great priority. Not so much a condition as an archetypal figure, death was treated as a something mysterious, a guardian between worlds. Finally, we can see in art a trend toward the decadent. With both the blurring of boundaries between high and low art, due, in part to increasingly sophisticated technology of reproduction, and the extraordinary rise of bohemianism in the large cities of Europe—London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin—art, either lamentably or thankfully, became increasingly more decadent, more unrestrained, and more reflective of the workings of the cultural underground and underworld. Perhaps the prime exemplar of this trend is to be found in Toulese-Latrec, whose documentation of the Parisian bohemian life captured the spirit of the times in the urban centers of Europe.

Popular Culture:

If Toulese-Latrec was as much a documentarian as artist, then his works relay information about fin de siecle Western society; it was becoming an age of decadence. As cities grew, economies expanded, and as money became increasingly more available to the many, a culture rose to challenge the mores of the Victorian bourgeoisie that so dominated Europe in much of the nineteenth century. An increasing interest and tolerance in the erotic and in drugs was becoming noticeable in the middle classes. Some argued that this was signaling the breakdown of Western society. Others assumed that a restrictive prohibition on the fundamental aspects of human nature was finally relaxing. In either case, an ambiance of Dionysius was to rule supreme over the cultural capitals of Europe in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Cultural disintegration and breakdown could also be seen in the rise of print advertising. The craze created over printed materials, particularly the poster, was a signaling to many of the complete renaissance of image; this period truly characterized the birth of popular image-making. With Art Nouveau flourishing, poster dealerships rising in influence, and with the public’s fervor for poster shows, image—Neptune’s archetypal imprint in culture—became an obsession—Pluto’s drive at work. Even more outstanding, the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of cinema. The moving image was an entirely new way in which the world was to be conceived, perceived, and comprehended. As the Neptune-Pluto conjunction of the late 1300’s saw the birth of perspective in art, this previous Neptune-Pluto conjunction was no less phenomenal, correlating with a tremendously evolutionary advance in how the world was to honor its imagination.

The gothic novel, or the interest in gothic themes, which petered out by the 1840’s in Europe made an extraordinary resurgence again by the 1880’s. Particularly in Great Britain, popular culture thirsted for material that synthesized the fantastic and otherworldly—facets of Neptune—with the dark and erotic, obvious characteristics of Pluto. Often with an emphasis on the resurrection of mythological figures, the high gothic subcultures in the late nineteenth century had an insatiable desire for the dark and mysterious in theater and novels. Popular culture’s interest in the gothic and occult novel culminated in the publication of Bram Stocker’s Dracula. Second only to the Christian bible in terms of overall sales, Dracula’s influence on popular culture cannot be underestimated. (4) In Dracula, we have the archetypal figure of the romantic seducer, both extraordinarily erotic, hypnotic, and powerful but simultaneously wounded, repulsive, and pathologically lecherous.

The Rise of the Unconscious:

Cultural historians often remark that William James, the pre-eminent American psychologist at the turn of the twentieth century, was a psychologist that wrote and thought more like a novelist. Interestingly, historians continue, James’s brother, Henry, the acclaimed novelist, wrote and observed things psychologically. With the James brothers, we see a trend that was broadly occurring at the end of the nineteenth century: novelists and writers were becoming more psychologically sophisticated as the new science of psychology was thoroughly steeped with mythological, literary, and romantic themes. This parallelism between the James brothers is even more heightened in the figures of Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, the famous Austrian novelist. Contemporaries in Vienna and acute observers of their social milieu, Freud and Schnitzler came to radically similar conclusions about the human condition—only their titles of psychologist and writer separated these men.

The James brothers, Freud, and Schnitzler were individuals that tapped into a trend that was occurring at this time: the deep waters of the non-rational and the collective unconscious were at high tide in the late nineteenth century. We can assume Pluto and Neptune to be the two main planetary archetypes associated with the collective unconscious. Neptune, representing the world of myth, dream, streams of consciousness, and subjective moods encapsulates what might we called the symbolic function of the unconscious. Pluto, on the other hand, represents the repressed, sexual, aggressive, and violent aspects of the unconscious, what might be called the primary or primal functions of the unconscious. Forming a conjunction in the nineteenth century, Pluto and Neptune deeply activated each others’ potentials; the two sides of the collective unconscious were potently engaged.

This extreme activation of the collective unconscious created something of a disturbance or free-floating anxiety in the mood of the times. With Pluto’s threatening, libidinous, and violent potentials floating around in the images and subjective experience of the collective psyche, a difficult pessimism, anxiety, and sense of decay was in the air at the time. As a picture is worth a thousand words, Edvard Munch’s The Scream conveyed the generalized disturbance of the time. Pluto’s manifestation was to be most easily discernible in the Neptunian dimension—the “collective ether.” A fog of threat vaporized at this time.

The bourgeois answer to the freeform perturbance of the time was the same as always—the unexamined life. However, the artists, novelists, and thinkers went deep into the dimensions available to them at this time to understand what was truly going on at this point in history. There probings led to the discovery of the unconscious.

Freud, standing on the achievements of Mesmer, Charcot, Janet, and others, built the foundations of his psychology in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Immersed in the collective spirit informed by the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, Freud’s investigations were certainly emblematic of the symbolism and synthesis of these planetary archetypes. In a diary entry in late 1883, we see first glimmerings that would inform all of Freud’s psychology. As he wrote, “There is a psychology of the common man that is rather different from ours.” A “rabble,” he would call, to the common man that gave way to a spontaneity and directness that his bourgeois class had learned to control. (5) Freud was beginning to notice that the primal, sexual, and aggressive urges in humanity had been thoroughly repressed through the civilizing process. Moreover, the main avenue of exploring and recovering the energy and vitality of this aggressive repository, or Id, was through the investigating of subjective experience—dreams, hypnosis, and free association, for example. The results of his probing analysis bore fruit in his The Interpretation of Dreams, published at the dawn of the twentieth century in 1900. Its hiighly different than this, you freak!!

Conclusion:

The late nineteenth century displayed the power and scope of the collaboration of the planetary archetypes of Neptune and Pluto, the great carriers of mystery and the unknowable beyond. A conjunction of these two planets is a rare occurrence, something that happens along the order of every five hundred years. A conjunction is a synthesizing of two archetypes, creating a pattern greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, a conjunction between Pluto and Neptune describes a set of experiences and manifestations different from the manifestation of their constituent parts. The conjunction of the late nineteenth century was a rare time and represented a set of cultural circumstances that were unique. Under more prosaic times, it is usually more apt to think of Pluto and Neptune as representing parts of the psyche that are radically different in nature—the ultimate in paradox. Perhaps returning to Kubrick can illuminate these divergent archetypes. Full Metal Jacket concludes with a scene of war, chaos, and utter destruction. Soldiers march along with an apocalyptic background as their setting, and yet, as the young men stride amongst ruins, they sing a song from their youth, the “Mickey Mouse Club” themesong. Kubrick begins and ends with the “duality of man,” a seemingly insolvable paradox that can never be fully understood or fully resolved.

(1) A Saturn-Pluto conjunction, occurring at the outbreak of World War One stopped the trajectory of evolutionary advance at this time. We can contrast this with our own time when the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001-2003 quite profoundly stopped the evolutionary advances that were occurring in society during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, spanning the late 1980’s and 1990’s.

(2) Pluto’s archetypal power is more easily observed when it makes aspects to either Uranus and Saturn.

(3) Strickland, Carol. The Annotated Mona Lisa. 1992. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 124.

(4) Stocker’s research into Dracula began in 1890. At this time, the Pluto-Neptune conjunction at approximately eight degrees Gemini opposed Stocker’s Mercury at eight degrees Sagittarius.

(5) Gay, Peter. Schnitzler’s Century. 2002. New York: W.W. Norton, 26.