Neptune in Pisces: Creepy, Lurid, Macabre

I’ve always felt that Pisces is the creepiest sign/archetype in the Western zodiac. The reason is relatively simple: with Pisces, unlike the other signs (including water signs Cancer and Scorpio), the action is all underwater. The Piscean underwater-world is full of shadiness, darkness, strange, magnetic beauty but also erosion, deterioration, and death. Underwater, consciousness may bump into anything without knowing what it is: friend or impostor, predator or prey. I bring this up because Neptune, Pisces’ ruling planet, is doing a long-term transit in Pisces as of 2015, and will be in Pisces for the foreseeable future. Which, if one were to take it literally (I take it, as I take most occult/astrology lure, half-literally), signifies a strange time in which inexplicable things happen, magnetic currents create an underwater sensation for a large portion of Earth’s populace, and there is a creepy evanescence to all the regular pastimes and pursuits with which the human race passes its time or expends its energy. 

When I was a teenager, I learned the basics of astrology quite thoroughly. It took me fifteen years, into my thirties, to come to grips with what for me became an obvious fact, hewn right into my birth chart: astrology does not always literally work. The archetypes, however, are interesting: for me, the strongest are Pisces, Scorpio, Gemini, and Libra. Virgo occupies its own second tier, and the rest are semi-scrubs. As for what works in my own natal chart: Scorpio rising, Mercury in Capricorn in the third house, and Mars in Gemini in the eighth. The rest is poppycock. If anyone cares: my real sun sign in Scorpio (I’m a double Scorp), and my Venus is most assuredly in Pisces, one reason this Neptune transit is so interesting for me. Phenomenology is profoundly Piscean— the flow of consciousness, its interiors and exteriors, has its own underwater algorithms, especially in contexts like the Cheltenham Elegies. Underwater consciousness is facilitated by Neptune transiting Pisces— as is the underwater sense, in relation to language and textuality, that sudden shifts may be made towards elucidating and incising new phenomenological possibilities between sound and sense in major high art consonant poetry and art, Elegies, Odes, and the rest; even if what data is uncovered has the sense of unsettling (creeping out) readers with an underwater world which conflates essences of fecundity with macabre signifiers of deterioration, decay, and death.

A quirk about Pisces as an archetype: the weird, wafflish sense Pisces has of time itself, of temporality. When there are Piscean energies around, time works in mysterious ways— twenty minutes can last an excruciating five hours; or twelve hours can pass by pleasantly in twenty minutes. Time becomes underwater time. The fluidity between moments with Pisces is something which can be tapped into: through art, sex, intense intellectual labors, or even time spent doing nothing, staring vacantly into space. Staring vacantly into space, by the way, should be big during Neptune’s transit through Pisces: all those little times, daily times, when we could choose to either do something or nothing, will be touched by the creepish underwater sense that we are being pushed back into lethargic, recumbent torpor. Yet, when the graceful side of the fluidity manifests, our time spent doing nothing will subtly shift our moods upwards, towards a greater sense of unity and relaxed acceptance of the fluidity of whatever consciousness wavelengths are flowing in.