Neptune in Aquarius

Neptune in tropical Aquarius; because Neptune moves even more slowly than Uranus, the tradition reads a sign placement like this one for a whole generation as much as for any one person

What the tradition reads

Neptune takes some one hundred and sixty five years to cross the whole zodiac and so spends around fourteen years in any one sign, longer even than Uranus's own seven, and Cafe Astrology's own delineation treats a Neptune sign placement chiefly as a generational influence for exactly that reason, one shared by everyone born while the planet crossed that stretch of sky and felt personally only where it lines up with the Sun, Moon or another personal point in an individual chart. Aquarius is a fixed air sign, ruled traditionally by Saturn and, by the modern astrologers' own addition, by Uranus, and the tradition reads it as the sign of the group over the individual, detachment and a loyalty owed to the wider community rather than to any one person in it. Neptune there is read as a vision of an ideal world built around exactly that community: humanitarianism, the celebration of individuality, freedom and impartiality, along with a strong pull toward electronics, psychology and social science. A generation carrying the placement is read as one that dreams collectively of a fairer, more humane community for everyone that follows it, atmosphere more than any one chart's private signature, best read alongside whatever else in that chart belongs more properly to the individual.

The story

Neptune, the Roman god of the sea and of fresh water, was, in the tradition the Romans inherited from the Greeks, a brother of Jupiter and Pluto, the three of them dividing the whole of the world between themselves so that one ruled the sky, one the sea, and one the underworld below it; before he was chiefly a sea god at all, Neptune was worshipped as a patron of freshwater springs and, like his Greek counterpart, of horses and horse racing. Aquarius's own water carrier was, to the Greeks, Ganymede, a Phrygian youth carried off by Zeus to serve the gods forever after as their cupbearer. A god who governs water only as his own third of a divided world meets, in Aquarius, a sign carrying water only as a vessel someone else is made to pour; a generation under Neptune here is read as one that dreams of a shared world poured out fairly to everyone in it, the way Neptune's own realm was itself only ever a fair third of a larger whole divided equally between three brothers.

Written from

Corpus key planet-in-sign:Neptune:Aquarius.