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Neptune and Pluto · a generation's undercurrent

Neptune in aspect to Pluto

This is the slowest pair in the chart. Neptune and Pluto stay within aspect of each other for decades, so the contact belongs to a whole generation and describes the deep assumptions of an era rather than anything about an individual. It becomes readable for an individual only where one of the two lands on a personal point, or in a house that gives it somewhere particular to work. What the pairing describes collectively is the meeting of imagination and depth: the myths a period lives by, and the slow dissolving and rebuilding of what a culture considers self-evident.

Full guide

What each body brings

The soft aspects (trine or sextile)

Almost everyone alive today was born with these two in a sextile, which has held for well over a century; a shared aspect of that duration distinguishes nobody. Its collective sense is a certain fluency between spiritual longing and psychological depth, visible in a period's art and its therapies. For an individual reading, look instead to the house involved and to any contact with the faster planets.

The hard aspects (square or opposition)

Hard aspects between Neptune and Pluto occur only at intervals of several centuries, so they fall outside the range of living charts. Where an older nativity carries one, it marks an era of profound cultural disintegration and reformation rather than a personal difficulty. As with every outer-planet pairing, nothing individual can be read from it without a personal planet or an angle involved.

The conjunction

The conjunction recurs roughly every four hundred and ninety years; the last occurred in the eighteen nineties, in Gemini, and appears in charts from that period. It marks the opening of a long cultural cycle rather than a trait. Even there its expression depends on house position and on contact with the lights or the angles, and it is read as historical background before anything else.

Reading it in a chart

The orb settles how strongly this shows: a contact within a degree is a defining feature of a chart, one at the edge of the orb is a colouring. The signs the two planets occupy change the manner, the houses change the arena, and a third planet touching either of them can change the reading entirely.

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All aspects Neptune through the signs