Neptune opposition Pluto
Neptune opposition Pluto, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry
What the tradition reads
Neptune and Pluto are, in Wikipedia's own phrase, among the "slower moving planets," whose transits it calls more powerful and noticeable than those of the inner planets, so that an opposition between them can persist for some time. Within one chart, Cafe Astrology's transit reading reads the opposition as a turning point regarding a person's attachments, disillusionment a large part of the process as things once revered or glamorized fall from their pedestal; though these revelations concern broad or collective matters, the source says they can affect a person profoundly, ultimately moving someone toward more authentic inspiration and attachment even while confusing feelings of disconnection pass through first. Between two charts, an opposition from one person's Neptune to another's Pluto sets the two planets at opposite points of the circle, a hundred and eighty degrees apart; the sources consulted for this entry give no separate reading for this specific synastry contact.
The story
An opposition sets two points diametrically apart, a hundred and eighty degrees, half the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs calls it, together with the square, discordant, and Wikipedia's own summary credits the medieval astrologer Ibn Ezra with calling the opposition the most powerful aspect, relational rather than blending as a conjunction does, its dichotomous quality often read as tense, though like any axis its two ends can be read as complementary as easily as oppositional. Poseidon and Hades are brothers, two of the six children Cronus and Rhea bore according to the Hesiod genealogy the Pluto myth page relates; when the world was divided three ways, the sea fell to Poseidon and the underworld to Hades, so the brothers rule adjoining domains beneath the sky their brother Zeus rules from above. The same page notes that the underworld god was also worshipped as Plouton, a name tied to the Greeks' own sense that mineral wealth found underground belonged to the same chthonic power that governed the earth's dead. Set at opposite ends of the circle, the two brothers face each other across the sky Zeus rules between them, the sea's constant dissolving answered by an underworld that gives nothing back before its own time.
Written from
- Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, Chapter XVI (Ashmand translation, Project Gutenberg ebook 70850, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70850/70850-h/70850-h.htm)
- Wikipedia, Aspect (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Transit (astrology)
- Wikipedia, Neptune (mythology)
- Wikipedia, Pluto (mythology)
- Cafe Astrology, Neptune Transits
- Wikipedia, Astrological compatibility
Corpus key aspect:Neptune:Pluto:opposition.