Wounded Waters—Neptune and Chiron in Pisces

Chiron’s re-entry into Pisces on February 8 represents a cosmic mission: to get us in touch with our feelings. But not our unique, personal feelings. Pisces is about the kind of feelings that we share with everyone else. When we feel these, we know how the whole group intelligence is feeling. We become engaged with our fellow humans.

And if we confer sentience upon non-human beings—upon even earthworms and trees and rocks and stars—then we must extend this idea even further, and say that Pisces represents an emotional connectedness with every single thing in existence. Every molecule, every ion, every microdot of “empty” space. Pisces knows what the Bioneers are talking about, when they say, “It’s all alive; it’s all intelligent; it’s all connected.”

For at least part of the month of March, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Chiron and Uranus will all be in sign of the fishes. As I have written elsewhere, Pisces is a transpersonal sign, not a personal sign. It doesn’t do well when we try to enclose its truths within our own little personality. It is confounded by the boundaries entailed in living as a singular ego. When it is stuffed into the too-small package of our individuality, Pisces just leaks out. It never got the memo about there being an operative distinction between Me and Not-Me.

It’s only when Pisces is understood to be about the spiritual dimension that its weaknesses become its strengths, and its strengths become its wisdom. Then it knows how to forge an alliance between ourselves and the All-That-Is.

Burning Waters

Chiron’s ingress last month can be seen as a sneak preview of the once-in-168-year ingress of Neptune into Pisces next month. Together they will offer us a teaching about the inextricable unity of all things.

February 8 marked the second of Chiron’s ingresses this cycle. Its first was April 20, 2010, a day that will live in infamy for all who feel themselves to be children of the Earth. That was the day the Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico. To look at the astrological chart of the explosion is to see the whole eight-year transit of Chiron in Pisces in microcosm. The event was replete with Piscean symbolism: the ocean, the martyrdom of flora and fauna, the sacrifice of living things for corporate profit.

It is perhaps easier in retrospect than it was at the time to see the Chironic teaching behind this environmental tragedy. It put millions of ordinary people in touch, through deep feeling, with something beyond themselves. All over the world people were watching the devastation on their TV screens, day after day, together, in real time. Heartfelt responses poured forth, and were pooled together in a unity—from letters-to-the-editor writers, poets, journalists and bloggers—all declaring themselves advocates of our Mother planet. Amidst the horror and grief, something profound took place: a massive collective pledging of allegiance to Nature. Most of the paeans that were written and shared made reference to the Earth as a living being: an integrated body, whose rocks are her bones, whose waters are her blood.

Though the disaster has left the headlines, its multitudinous reverberations continue to spread, extending outwards like concentric circles from a stone thrown into a pond. (1)

Clean Water

In the years ahead, the impact of our dead rivers and poisoned deltas, our polluted streams and extinct marine species will become undeniable. An immediate and everyday example of our negligent stewardship of this most primal of resources is the scarcity of clean water, which is growing in urgency as a global problem.

We are being inaugurated into a period where we will move deeper than mere fact-finding. The Chiron ingresses followed by the grand event on April 4th—Neptune’s entry into the sign of its rulership (2)—are introducing to human awareness a new way of looking at water. More precisely, these transits are about a new way of feeling the importance of water, inspiring sensitive souls to undertake a Piscean form of activism: an advocacy based on emotional empathy. More and more people will respond to the toxicity of the world’s waterways as a loving parent would respond to the wounds of her child, or as a child would respond to the wounds of its mother.

The all-encompassing seas surround and unite landmasses. They are the matrix whence all Life springs. Pisces does on a psycho-spiritual level what the Earth’s oceans do on a physical level. These Piscean transits will make it relentlessly clear to the obtuse human mind that we’re all in this together.

The Great Flood

Every culture old enough to have legends has a version of the Great Flood story. It is a tale that resides deep in the collective unconscious, telling of a deluge (Neptune) whose purpose is to all-but-destroy an irremediably wounded (Chiron) human race, giving the few survivors a chance to start all over again. Since the opposition of Saturn (structures) and Neptune (melting) in 2006-7, the mass mind has been inundated with the latest iteration of the legend. We are awash in the imagery of breaking levees and flooded cities. Animals and birds are migrating away from the planet’s climate-compromised zones, seeking higher ground—just as they did in the story of Noah’s ark (see the Skywatch for March 2011 on MotherSky.com).

Myths exist in the human mass mind for a purpose. The Great Flood myth is experiencing a renaissance, in our era, in order to supply us with a coded multidimensional teaching. It is giving us an image of vengeful water, of gigantic floods that wash everything clean. We are being prompted to purify that which we have made toxic, and to take responsibility for the guardianship of our planetary home.

On a physical level, geological and meteorological water emergencies over the years ahead will force us to understand and revere the laws of water. At the same time, we will be absorbing this lesson on a trans-physical level. Our enhanced attention to water will show us the extent to which we are all psycho-spiritually bound together. Neptune and Chiron in Pisces will make it inescapably clear that all beings are drops of water in the same cosmic sea.

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Notes:

(1) The studies that have been done since the disaster, and as a consequence of it, are evidence of its continuing impact as a consciousness-raiser. For example, research on the toxin Corexit (!) used during and after the “spill” is raising alarming questions. A senator from Louisiana has launched a petition drive to address the issue.

(2) Neptune will stay in Pisces until 2026, apart from a brief retrograde period in Aquarius between August 4, 2011 and February 2012.

Jessica Murray

Jessica Murray trained as a fine artist before graduating in 1973 from Brown University, where she studied psychology and linguistics. After a stint in political theatre in the heady early ’70s, Jessica moved to San Francisco and began studying metaphysics, where she has had a full-time private practice in astrology for more than 30 years. Her book, Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer’s View of America, is available through her website, mothersky.com.
In addition to her column in Daykeeper Journal and the monthly Skywatch on her website, Jessica’s essays appear in “The Mountain Astrologer,” “P.S. Magazine” and other publications. Jessica can be reached by email.