Almagest

The library · A planet in a house

Neptune in the eleventh house

Neptune in the eleventh house (Western)

What the tradition reads

The eleventh house is described by Alan Leo as the house of friends, acquaintances, hopes, wishes and aspirations, which, taken alone and free from affliction, he counts a benefic house inclined toward good fortune, pleasure and happiness, and which has sympathy with the tenth in the charts of those concerned with the many rather than the few. Neptune placed there is read by the tradition as a genuinely accepting, idealistic view of friendship and community, flexible and adaptable with the people it lets in, with real compassion for whoever seems overlooked or downtrodden by everyone else. The astrologers read a risk of being too accommodating, or insufficiently selective about who is let close, which can leave the placement open to being deceived or quietly taken advantage of. A recurring difficulty locating one's own deepest wishes is named as characteristic, alongside a tendency to feel unsatisfied even after reaching a hoped-for goal, since the underlying wish was never entirely clear to begin with. The tradition reads a real yearning for true camaraderie and something like spiritual connection within a group, an ideal that, held too high, tends to leave the placement disappointed by whatever more ordinary friendship actually offers. What the placement is credited with, at its best, is a genuine gift for drawing in artistic, sensitive or unusual people and for real, generous compassion, provided some clear boundary keeps that generosity from being quietly used up.

The story

Neptune's own festival, the Neptunalia, was celebrated at the height of summer, when freshwater ran lowest and the heat was worst, and it was marked by an unusually communal, informal kind of gathering: Romans built simple huts of branches in the woods between the Tiber and the Via Salaria and spent the day there drinking spring water and wine together to escape the heat. It was, by ancient account, a time of real merrymaking, when men and women mixed more freely than the usual constraints of Roman society otherwise allowed, a shared, temporary community built for the length of a single festival rather than lasting any longer than that. There was no elaborate ceremony required to take part, only the shared branch shelter, the shared water, and a common relief from the same summer heat everyone was equally suffering under. Neptune in the eleventh house is read through this same easy, temporary communal gathering, hopes and friendships built less around formal structure than around a shared relief or a shared need, everyone welcome for as long as the underlying reason for gathering actually lasts.

Written from

Corpus key planet-in-house:Neptune:11.