The Shape of Our Times
A scientifish look at the relation between Neptune and Pluto (aka, it’s squiggles all the way down)
TL;DR — we’re living through a period that started in the 1930s and runs until the 2040s that has only happened nine times in the last ~2000 years.
This (rather lengthy) article explores what those periods are, how they were calculated, and briefly touches upon some of the major spiritual/political events of those times by looking at them through the lens of astrology… hence the “scientifish” descriptor.
In no way is this an exhaustive or “correct” historical review, but I hope it sparks some good conversations, and thank you in advance for reading!
As a Princeton alum with a BSE in Chemical Engineering, I’m probably not who comes to mind when you think of an astrologer.
However, before the age of computers, anyone attempting to calculate the movement of planets, appearance of comets, and timing of eclipses needed some impressive math skills, as predicting those events were of great importance to those employing astrologers.
Plus, astrology is fun.
For this and other reasons, I’m someone who straddles the line between reason and faith… between the rational and irrational… and this article is meant to share some of the data I’ve been looking at as we head into the second half of this tumultuous year.
This piece will start off on the rational and scientific side of things and slowly move away towards the end.
All that said, I am not here to tell you what these patterns mean in some definitive sense nor what you *should* think about them. I believe in “yes/and” as a guiding principle, so your opinions and insights are welcome.
And with that preamble complete, let’s dive in:
Squiggles… great… so what is this chart all about?
Well, the title tells us that the graph shows the degrees of separation between Neptune and Pluto from -50 to 2100, with the horizontal axis showing the years (using Common Era numbering).
The vertical axis has a range of 0 to 180 degrees, with additional labels to the left to denote some of the most common astrological terms for the separation between objects (e.g. 0 is called a “Conjunction”, 180 is called an “Opposition”, 90 is a “Square”, 120 is a “Trine”, 60 is a “Sextile”).
Before we get into what’s special about this chart, which you may already guess, let’s look at several other charts with different planets for the same time period (and yes, I’m using “planets” to denote planets and dwarf planets, such as Pluto).
Here’s the chart for the angles between Uranus and Neptune from -50 BCE to 2100 CE:
And here’s the chart for the angles between Uranus and Pluto from -50 BCE to 2100 CE:
What you’ll no doubt see in Graphs 2 and 3 are the lack of Graph 1's “squiggles” (which is definitely not the scientific term) that we saw in the graph for the separation between Neptune and Pluto.
These squiggles (I’m just going with it) occur because Pluto’s orbit is moderately eccentric (i.e. less circular than most planetary orbits), and there’s a period of time during its ~248-year orbit when Pluto is nearer the Sun and therefore moves much faster than when it is in the outermost reaches of its orbit. This close approach actually brings Pluto within Neptune’s orbit, but since Pluto’s orbit is also inclined to the ecliptic (i.e. out of the plane where most planets orbit), Pluto won’t collide with Neptune.
So, when Pluto is in one of these speedy zones, the increased rate of motion is anomalously faster relative to Neptune, the angular separation between Pluto and Neptune (with respect to the Earth) reverses from its “normal” course… causing squiggles.
This speedy period of Pluto’s occurs every ~248 years, since it happens once during each of its orbits, and it currently occurs “soon” (in a relative sense) after either a conjunction with Pluto or after an opposition.
Since the nine squiggles happen either when Pluto and Neptune are ~45–65 degrees apart post-conjunction OR when they are ~120–135 degrees apart post-opposition, we can divide the occurrences into Series A and Series B as shown in Graph 4:
We can also define a squiggle to have different sections, such as below:
Here, we casually define a “penumbra” as the ~5 degrees before and after the period of time marked by the highest and lowest values of the squiggle. For the instance we are currently living through of A5 (i.e. Series A, Instance 5), the penumbra started around 1933 and went until the Main Phase started around 1939. The Main Phase is defined by the maximum and minimum values at the inflection points within the squiggle. The First Inflection was around 1966, with the Second Inflection around 2008. The Main Phase of A5 ends around 2039, with the penumbra ending around 2045.
Below are the values for these sections for all instances in these series:
At this point, you may be rightly asking what any of this has to do with astrology. As we are getting to that, there are some implicit astrological ideas contained above that should be made explicit before we dive fully into the art of astrology and leave the science behind.
The part of this so far that has at least one foot in the realm of astrology and one foot in the realm of science is how we determine the locations for the planets.
Space has no fixed points, so to define a location of something, we first decide that we will define their location with respect to the Earth. We could have chosen the Sun or any other body in the Solar System or elsewhere, but we live here on Earth, so let’s go with that for now. [As an aside, if we ever move to Mars or any other planet, we’ll need to reinvent astrology, which is a very fun thought experiment that I’ll get to sooner or later.]
After deciding that Earth is our “fixed” point, we also define the plane of Earth’s path around the Sun (i.e. the ecliptic) as our frame of reference to note where a planet is in a two-dimensional sense in relation to Earth. For this exercise, we don’t care how far away a planet is from the Earth, nor do we care how far a planet deviates away from the ecliptic (i.e. its declination). For example, we will consider planets to be in “conjunction” or 0 degrees apart with respect to the ecliptic although they may actually be quite far apart in terms of their declination and apparent position in the sky.
We also chose to report planetary locations yearly, since the planets surveyed move slowly relative to Earth’s ~365 day orbit around our sun. For the yearly data points, we chose to report on their positions on the first full day of spring in the northern hemisphere (which was anywhere from March 24 to March 11 in the timeframe surveyed, because calendars are hard). We chose the vernal equinox partially because the first day of spring is International Astrology Day, partially because it was a way to “normalize” the data, partially because astronomers use the vernal equinox as their zero point for right ascensions measurements (instead of using astrological signs), and partially (mostly) because March 21 is my birthday.
Now, if we were diving fully into the art of astrology, we would ask a few more questions: what are the meanings of Neptune, what are the meanings of Pluto, what are the meanings of the angles between them, and where on the ecliptic with relation to the spring equinox are these squiggles happening?
We ask these because astrology says to us that patterns in time have meaning when observed in relation to one another, and that by slipping on astrological lenses, these patterns may become clearer.
With that said, we’re going to focus on a few of the above factors and leave others for another day.
Our focus will be on which planets are involved (Neptune and Pluto here), and we will put aside placement on the ecliptic (i.e. signs) and leave those to the Addendum for those interested.
Table 1 shows the dates in both Series A and Series B for all phases and inflection points, which is intentionally ignorant of astrology.
There’s over a hundred years of history in each of these instances, so how do we make sense of them?
We start by putting on lenses of astrology to filter what we’re looking at through our understanding of the archetypes involved. [As another aside, exploring archetypes is an entire other article.]
So, what could we expect from these times when Neptune and Pluto interact?
Let’s start with some information about the astrological meanings attributed to these planets from Astro.com (one of my go-to sites):
[Neptune] gives us the supersensory, opens doors to mystical experience and the transcendental. On this level it is hard to discern where perception moves into deception, illusion and false appearances, and so Neptune is associated with all of these, with drugs and all kinds of pseudo-realities.
Pluto describes how we deal with power, personal and non-personal, be it through suffering the power of others or exercising it ourselves. It describes how we meet the demonic and magical, our regenerative powers and our capacity for radical change and rebirth: the cycles of dying and becoming.
With astrology, without some degree of focus you may not be able to make out what you’re looking at, so let’s focus our historical review of these Neptune and Pluto squiggles through the lens of major shifts in spiritual power (i.e. spiritual = Neptune, power = Pluto):
We take a dash of Neptune’s mysticism and a skosh of Pluto’s transformative suffering to get the life, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ during A1. (Regardless of where you stand on his divinity, you cannot argue the impact he’s had on these last two millennia.) We also get the middle of the Great Roman Civil War (or Caesar’s Civil War from 49–45 BC).
Following early Christian institutions, in A2 we see the 4th Ecumenical Council in 451, which led to the Imperial Roman Church’s schism with the Oriental Orthodox Church. Of note, we also see in A2 radical power changes with Rome’s fall in 476 as well as the birth of the pseudo-reality of King Arthur’s adventures, which ended supposedly with the Battle of Camlann in 537.
In A3, we find the East-West Schism (aka Great Schism) in 1054 between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
In A4, we find even more schisms with Martin Luther rejecting the Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences (a very Neptune/Pluto concept that you could pay to reduce afterlife punishment for your worldly sins) as well as Henry VIII’s declaring himself head of the Church of England.
So, before getting to A5, we find major spiritual power schisms in every Pluto/Neptune inversion period (a fancy way of saying “squiggle”). The origin of the schism of Christianity from Judaism in A1, the schism of Oriental Orthodoxy in A2, the schism of Eastern Orthodoxy in A3, and the schisms of the Protestant and English Reformations in A4. The main schism that does not neatly fit this pattern is that of the Assyrian Church of the East just decades before A2’s penumbra period began.
Having looked at history and seemingly observing this pattern of spiritual power shifts during Series A squiggles, we would perhaps expect to see similar events unfolding in A5.
In A5’s beginning, we find the Nazi’s fascination with power (Pluto) and mysticism (Neptune) at the cycle’s start, experiments with drugs (Neptune) and civil unrest (Pluto) in the cycle’s middle, and… well… everything happening now as we move towards the end of A5’s main phase. We also see the Catholic–Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965, which was the first baby steps of peace between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church since the Great Schism in A3. In that same vein, we also see 1994's Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East as those organizations making peace since their schism right before A2 began. Notably, we also see the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, the rise in Evangelical Christianity, Vatican II, and the revelation of sexual predation by clergy during this period.
So, we see that some (perhaps most) of the biggest upheavals in Christianity’s spiritual power bases came during these inflection periods in Series A. We could build a story around these timeframes being topsy-turvy for that religion and that the fallout from the period we’re in (e.g. A5) will fit that theme. Perhaps one of our major leaders will attempt to declare himself the head of a church or found a new type of religion or cult of self… it would not be unexpected given the times.
And, yes, all of above have the caveat that my lens focused mainly on Christian, European, & American cultures, because that’s what I’m most familiar with given my background, and because I intentionally chose that lens. I would love for someone else with a different set of eyes and experiences to look at those dates and share what they see.
Ok, so what about Series B?
In B1 the Roman Empire nearly collapsed during the Imperial Crisis (aka Military Anarchy) of 235–284 after the assassination of Emperor Severus.
B2 saw Charlemagne unite most of Western Europe (while at the same time laying the foundation for the Great Schism of 1054 in A3).
In Series B3, we see the Magna Carta being signed, English civil war, and a bunch of Crusades (3rd through 9th).
And in Series B4, we see that it culminates with the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution of the United States.
So, the flavor of these periods, at least from my cherry-picked history, is one of major nation destabilization and rebuilding. The Plutonian power dynamic is evident, as is the Neptunian relationship to major shifts in reality (as the momentous historical events of Series B precipitated).
The flavor of Series B seems to be more about nations than churches, while Series A was the latter, but the interplay of power and reality is evident in both.
Sure, but really… what does all this mean?
Like anything with astrology, when we put on its lens and look at the shape of history, we see patterns that tend to fit our expectations: Neptune and Pluto inflection periods tend to correlate with major political and/or spiritual upheavals.
And what does this mean for us now, since we’re living through a squiggle?
I would say that it’s what we already know: that we’re living in interesting times. It is possible that the spiritual power structures of our times are not done shifting, and that there will be some major changes in the next couple decades. Some in the spiritual arts are even making predications that we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift that will unfold over the next several thousand years. If so, it will be the historians of the future that look back and confirm whether that forecast held.
Regardless of predictions, I believe it is safe to say that this period that we’re in is abnormal from a temporal perspective, and it’s been this way for decades (since the 1930s). If there’s a bright side, it’s that we’re nearing the end of A5’s cycle, and that we’ll be out of it around 2045.
Author’s Notes
Thank you for reading! If you liked this type of analysis, you’ll probably also enjoy Richard Tarnas’s work. In his “Cosmos and Psyche” book, he also looks at history through an astrological lens.
Also, this article was not meant to be an exhaustive review of 2150 years of history, although it was definitely meant to loosely correspond with the “Age of Pisces” as this time period is known in some circles.
In actual scientific terms, there is a concept called “The Great Year”, which is the 25,772 years it takes for the precession of the equinoxes to occur (i.e. when the constellation rising on the first day of spring makes its way through the entire zodiac and back to the start of Aries). One twelfth of the Great Year is ~2148 years.
Addendums
For those who would like the astrological (tropical) positions for the series above, the charts are below, and I scraped the spring equinox data from here.
