The Ninth Wave: Neptune, Pisces, And Jupiter

Neptune in Pisces Direct (1 Dec 2021) Jupiter Conjunct Neptune in Pisces (12 April 2022)

Oh, the irony of the word direct, for Neptune in Pisces! There is only implied, out of the corner of the eye, poeticised.

In the other world, in the dream world, and in the spirit world, everything is much more nebulous. There is an order, but not like our physical realm order at all. The dream world, in particular, is unbounded, and at times can be a crossroads between all these places. The word ‘reality’ has no place here; there is only being and experience, so much of it subjective, all of it unquantifiable.

And in true Neptune in Pisces fashion, it can seep its way into every day, the waking world of physical reality in the most curious and uncanny of ways. The waters of Neptune and Pisces is the gap through which experience of the mystical, the numinous, and the terrifyingly other can reach us be it through dreams, psychoactive plants, drugs, divination, ritual, art, or sheer happenstance.

As the rising tide becomes a swell moving towards the Jupiter and Neptune Conjunction in Pisces next year, we will experience all the gifts and forfeits that this fate of planets brings.

It will be like a great Ninth Wave. Waters that threaten our existence as we know it, that we cannot navigate except by stars alone, and will overwhelm us in the deluge of all manner of things. It might include real flooding of our homes in these global warming times, but it will also be many of the significations of Neptune and Jupiter in Pisces, magnified by the Giant planet Jupiter (see below for a list of significations for Neptune).

Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame

Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Coming of Arthur.

The threat is of not knowing, of saturation of our ability to comprehend in a sea of ever-shifting circumstances and information. It is likely that interest in the occult and alternative spiritualities, magic, astrology and the like will peak with increasing mundane instability. It has been rising since Neptune entered Pisces back in 2011; I can remember a time before as a tarot reader when such things were deeply unpopular, especially to the mainstream, and even pagan and occult circles had a strong whiff of atheism about them, not daring to admit that some of this might be real.

These days everything is embraced and even branded with such gusto and lack of critique…but it doesn’t bother me. They are threatening to state-endorsed religions and atheism like a Kraken. These surges are great opportunities for viral effects to take place, things get around, evolve, flourish, and die; what will remain is potent and the real. When the surge of popularity is gone some while after peak interest, the tide takes back the flotsam and jetsam, and what remains of the shore is worth it all. The core remains, having gathered everybody up and kept those who were committed, who were meant to be part of the stream.

There may be an increase in everything mystical, the perfect time for full emergence of the imaginal and immersion into it. It is not without its perils, as mermaids and misinformation come to drown you. You could be lost in a maze of your own imaginative creation.

Here is Kate Bush talking about her album called The Ninth Wave.

The Ninth Wave was a film, that’s how I thought of it. It’s the idea of this person being in the water, how they’ve got there, we don’t know. But the idea is that they’ve been on a ship and they’ve been washed over the side so they’re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery, the thought of being completely alone in all this water. And they’ve got a life jacket with a little light so that if anyone should be traveling at night they’ll see the light and know they’re there. And they’re absolutely terrified, and they’re completely alone at the mercy of their imagination, which again I personally find such a terrifying thing, the power of ones own imagination being let loose on something like that. And the idea that they’ve got it in their head that they mustn’t fall asleep, because if you fall asleep when you’re in the water, I’ve heard that you roll over and so you drown, so they’re trying to keep themselves awake.

(Kate Bush. Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love’. BBC Radio 1, 26 January 1992) From Kate Bush Encyclopaedia.

But there are plentiful ways in which we can employ the traits of this configuration to our advantage. It will take time, and other planetary engagement to see any results, as it is not one for delivering on promises; but it sets the scene.

It is time for a renaissance of the imaginal. Use it to harness every drop of your imagination and entertain it, engage with it, nourish it, and use it for a powerful good. Not the moral good, but the good of the soul. Use it to connect with those other realms, with the other you. Play with masks of being and remove them into unbeing. Enchant the world around you with chantments and poetry, fire under the stars, the ancestors beside you. Act out scenes of Myths, take an element of last night’s dream and place it in your day. Watch a sunset and a moon phase, take a herb, tell a story. Perform a rite in the rain in the dark on your own. I have done these things and come to no harm, and neither will you. If we all do it, the world will be enchanted, and that’s no bad thing; look where disenchantment and a world void of magic gets us. There is no escape from reality, so we may as well engage the whole of it and not just the tangible. If you start now when it comes you could be riding the crest of that wave, you could be the return of Arthur.

In Irish mythology, beyond the ninth wave is the eternal Isle of peace, the Blessed Isles, which has no physical place but nonetheless cartographers marked early maps as Hy–Brasil. Such is the bleed between this world and that. We could do with a little more of that. We could reach for that eternal isle, in the way that only magical practice and art can. We could go over the ninth wave and not just survive it but flourish. The Wave is coming, steer your imagination, go over.

Neptune and its significations:

Neptune is subtle and easily overlooked being an outer planet of slow motion, spending around 40% of the time retrograde, and over a decade in each sign making its effects inhabited for long enough to forget how it was different before, or will be different again.

The shady side of Neptune:

It is soporific and forgetful. Full of illusion, fogginess, uncertainty, confusion. Impractical, unreliable, insubstantial. Ambiguous. Persuasive in all the wrong ways. Charlatan. Deception. Conspiracy, lies, subterfuge. Smoke and mirrors, tricks, and scams. The unreal seem real, the real seem unreal. Hidden by virtue of being elusive and ill-defined. drug addiction.

The middle ground:

Unbounded or permeable boundaries. Trickery, Subjective experience. Virtual reality, Fantasy T.V. games of thrones, and merlin for example. Idealism. Beguiling.

The Beautiful Enigma of Neptune:

Dreams, Aspiration, creativity, psychic ability, imagination

Mystery, art, sacrifice,

photography, film, fiction, performance.

Unusual, uncanny, extraordinary. Dreams, astrology, art, fiction, music, theatre, imagination, Mysterium tremendum, ecstatic and mystical experience (but without breakthrough).

Rising paganism, witchcraft, astrology, tarot, ignited interest in indigenous ways of doing things

Psychoactive plants, altered state of consciousness, drugs which are hallucinogenic, opiate, psychoactive, intoxication, and relaxation.

_{Title image: Neptune’s Horses, Walter Crane}