Sun opposition Neptune

The Sun stands exactly opposite Neptune today, the Sun at the opening of Libra and Neptune, retrograde, at the opening of Aries, directly across the wheel from it.

Ptolemy counts this diametrical distance among the configurations that bind parts of the zodiac to one another. He calls it clear enough to need no explanation: two points facing each other across the full circle. So the lesson lies in what these two bodies bring to that facing.

Sepharial, in Cosmic Symbolism, makes the Sun the source of vitality and the foundation of the horoscope. He is careful to add that the Sun is the source of the cause of light rather than light itself, because "it is we who are the interpreters." Neptune, as we read it, is the principle of dissolution: the loosening of edges between one thing and another, and between what is and what is imagined. Set the two opposite each other and the light that makes things distinct is faced by the principle that blurs them. What is plainly in view and what is only hoped for become harder to tell apart.

The tradition divides on what follows. Sepharial's practical astrology is blunt. He holds that Neptune in ill aspect to the Sun shows danger of deceit, and that Neptune in general produces complications, an involved state of affairs and double-dealing.

The kabbalistic line reads the same loosening as two-sided. In Astrocábala, Neptune is the higher octave of Mercury. Mercury is the concrete mind, and Neptune is the universal, intuitive mind that reaches beyond established borders. Red Milenaria holds that the Neptune which brings disturbance also opens onto compassion, artistic genius and contemplation. We follow the kabbalistic line, which treats the condition as workable. Red Milenaria places the source of good and ill in us, and Sepharial himself wrote that the evil ascribed to planets exists only in those who receive and transmit their influence.

The practice comes from those two octaves of mind. While this opposition is close, let the wider mind do what it does well: imagine, sympathise, sense what lies beyond the obvious. Then hand anything that binds you to the concrete mind before you commit to it. Where an agreement, promise or plan is in front of you, write out in plain sentences what has actually been said, and separately what you are assuming. The Sun moves on within days and the edges firm again. Until then, the written sentence is the edge.