Does The Discovery Of The

Outer Planets Invalidate The

Astrology Of The Ancients?

NEPTUNE

On September 19,1846, four days before the

discovery of Neptune, a weeping Virgin Mary

appeared to two little boys in La Salette, France.

She was dressed in bursts of light and wore

slippers edged in roses. She spoke of her suffering

because the villagers frequently cursed in the

name of thn Lord and few people bothered to

reserve the Sabbath for prayer. She warned of

an impending famine.

By Daniel Heydon

The seeds that did not take to the earth in the harvest of 1846-47 soon became the seeds of discontent. Revolutions broke out in 1848 throughout Europe in protest over food shortages and political oppres­sion the multitudes had to endure.
 
At La Salette, a few days after the Lady's visitation, a man proposed to break off a piece of rock from where Our Lady had purportedly sat and, to his surprise, dis­covered a spring of water where there had been none before. Water was drawn from the spring and brought back in a bottle to a seriously ill woman in town. Each day she sipped from the water; nine days later, she was completely cured. This was the first of twenty-three miraculous healings reported by those who drank from the holy water of La Salette during the first year after the Virgin's visitation.1 
 
Symbolically, it is appropriate that the Mother of Christ should be seen at the time when Neptune, the planet associated with the water sign Pisces, should be dis­covered. In mythology, Neptune, or Posei­don, is the god of the sea; and the word Mary is derived from the Latin mare, meaning sea. Water is the source from which all life comes, which was always true in the history of symbolism, but scientif­ically was verified with the discovery of protoplasm in 1846, the year of Neptune's discovery in the solar system.
 
H. von Mohl's identification of proto­plasm, the fundamental material of which all living things are composed, ushered in a period when science would be concerned with the origins of life and the basic con­stituents of matter. The link between man and Pisces, sign of the fishes is literally
 

shown by Haeckel's study of embryonic development. He proved that at certain stages, the embryos of fish, birds, and mammals are very similar.- With Darwin's theory of evolution (1859) and the later discovery of photosynthesis, the interde­pendence of man, plants, fish, and animals was established. Neptune dissolves the boundaries that separate and shows the unity that exists in diversity.

Yet nature has its transcendental aspects as well. These were investigated by Thoreau, who in 1845 built himself a small cabin by the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He spent two years con­templating nature, growing vegetables, and living a life in accordance with the prin­ciples of Neptune and Pisces, both of which have an affinity with the twelfth house of a horoscope, which rules solitude, privacy, and the inner life.3

 

Despite Thoreau's recognition of the spiritual dimensions of ecology, scien­tific investigation of comparative anatomy and the interdependence of all living things laid the way to a materialistic view of life. The theory of evolution ran counter to the Genesis theory of creation; its chief apologists, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, were both self-declared agnostics. The word agnosticism was coined in 1869 by Huxley, who believed that the existence of God cannot be logically proved or dis­proved and that human ethics lie outside the scope of the materialistic processes of evolution.
 
With the discovery of Neptune, the plan­et associated with heaven and the afterlife, nirvana was to be found in the here and now, and science became a secular ideology whose fruits would lead to a better life for all. The dialectical materialism of commu­nism had its roots in Marx' and Engel's The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, two years after the discovery of Nep­tune. With Marxism, heaven was to be achieved by the revolution of the proletar­iat against the capitalists as the means to an ultimate classless society. Neptune un­der the guise of Marxism promised a Utopia for the propertyless laborer created by the Industrial Revolution. The poor would in­herit the earth.

THE VIRGIN MARY AND MARXISM

With Neptune as the outermost planet  in mankind's consciousness during the period from 1846 to 1930, the world witnessed the spread of atheistic doctrines as well as a growing interest in the cult of Mary. That the Virgin was to take a more active interest in human affairs was made clear in 1830, when she appeared to a mystic nun, Catherine Laboure, in Paris, France. During her visitations with Cath­erine, she revealed herself as the Mediatrix of all graces. Prayers to Mary are like a hot line to God. She is the intermediary between God and humankind.
 
As she first appeared to Catherine, her feet rested on a white globe upon the head of a green serpent. In her hands was a golden ball with a cross on it, which the Virgin said symbolized the world and each of its inhabitants. On six of her fingers were rings composed of precious stones, some of which emitted light, while others were dark.
 
Mary herself explained that the rays of light were symbols of the grace which she sheds on those who ask for it, whereas the gems from which no light radiated were the grace for which the souls forget to ask. Mary in this aspect was to be known as the Virgin of the Globe, and she requested that a statue be made picturing her as she ap­peared to Catherine.
 
She also gave directions for a medal to be made called the Medal of the Immacu­late Conception. She promised to bestow her blessings to those who wore the medal regardless of their religion. In time, this medal became known as the Miraculous Medal because of the numerous benefits that those who wore it later reported they had received.
 
What is of special interest to the student of astrology is Mary's request that twelve stars be engraved on the medal. According to Catherine, who was later made a saint by the Church, the stars are a clear refer­ence to the text in the Apocalypse 12:1— "A woman clothed in the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars."
Apocalyptic imagery is appropriate for the Virgin, whose appearance on earth seem to coincide with times of world crises. It is more than a mere coincidence that in most dictionaries or encyclopedias, the en­try after "Marxism" is "Mary." In our ref­erence books, Mary and Marxism exist right next to each other. If 1917 saw the dream of Marxism come true with the creation of a communist state with the Russian Revolution, it also marked Mary's appearance at Fatima in Portugal, where she predicted World War II and the dangers of communism. In her appearance, she said:
 
When you shall see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign from God that the chastisement of the world for its many transgressions is at hand through war, famine, persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and the Communion of reparations on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heard, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the entire world, provoking wars and per­secution of the Church. The good will suf­fer martyrdom; the Holy Father will suf­fer much; different nations will be annihi­lated. But in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph,. The Holy Father will conse­crate Russia to me, and it will be converted and some time of peace will be granted to humanity.4
 
One of the children to whom the Virgin appeared at Fatima asked for a miracle so that skeptics would believe in the reality of her apparitions. On October 13, 1917, with approximately 70,000 people gathered at Fatima in pouring rain, the "woman clothed in the sun" appeared around noon as she promised. After conversing with the children, rays of light extended from her hands in the direction of the sun; this was followed by an awesome display of celestial fireworks never before witnessed by earth's inhabitants.
 
According to the people there, the sun began spinning on its axis, sending multi­colored rays of light in all directions. Then, like an eyeball torn from its socket, the sun seemed to plunge headlong towards earth. It suddenly stopped and returned to its rightful place in the heavens, only to turn into a ball of fire before returning to nor­mal. Some twenty-four days later, the Bol­sheviks came to power in Russia.

 

The events at Fatima elude human com­prehension, yet serve to remind hu­manity that all cannot be explained by log­ical, scientific means. The same can be said of the Virgin's appearance to Bernadette at Lourdes in 1858, some twelve years after Neptune's discovery. Here, as at La Salette, she caused a spring of healing waters to appear. To this day, thousands of pilgrims make their way to Lourdes and leave be­hind them a trail of discarded crutches and burning candles to venerate the interces­sion of the Virgin on humanity's behalf.
 
To Bernadette she declared herself to be the Immaculate Conception. This statement popularized the then recent proclamation in 1854 of Pope Pius IX that Mary was con­ceived and born without original sin. Both the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Darwin's theory of evolution can be linked to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Aries in 1850-51. Aries is the sign of Adam, the first man; and Pluto in Aries describes both the fall of Adam and his descendants from divine grace and the Garden of Eden (Neptune), as well as the redemption of mankind through the resurrected Christ.
 
The Virgin of the Globe who appeared to Catherine with her foot on the serpent's head is the second Eve, who cooperates with Christ in the redemption of mankind, the woman referred to in Genesis 3:15 by God when he said to Satan: "I will put en­mities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel. 5 (Pisces is the sign of the feet.) To­day the Virgin still remains what is per­haps the real missing link in the Darwinian theory—that is, the connection between the human and the divine.
 

SIN AND REDEMPTION

Problems of sin and redemption made their appearance in a modern guise in the pages of world literature at the time of Neptune's discovery. While the majority of mankind was celebrating the primacy of reason and materialism in human affairs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Feodor Dostoevsky were preoccupied with the struggle be­tween good and evil in the human soul.

The irrational elements of the human experience which had been repressed with the glorification of reason now resurfaced in the macabre corners of the human heart as revealed by Poe. His introspective he­roes dwell in the twelfth house of the horo­scope. Veritable madmen, they reaffirmed the existence of evil at a time when shallow

 

reformers optimistically dismissed man's capacity for the same. In 1841, he invented the detective story with his Murders in the Rue Morgue—a genre in keeping with the twelfth house, which rules prisons in both the figurative and literal sense.

Hawthorne wrote what many call the first psychological novel with his Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. Exile and ostra­cism from the community are twelfth-house themes which are dealt with in the story of Hester Prynne, who is forced to wear a scarlet letter on her breast as the symbol of her adulterous sin. Revenge and the guilty conscience also make their pres­ence felt in this allegorical romance.

Nature in its cosmic aspect is encoun­tered by the obsessed Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick (1851). Themes of death and rebirth by water appear in this novel which reveals the sea as the arche­typal unconscious which man must pass through on his way to wholeness or self-annihilation. Good and evil are always co-passengers in his novels and tales about the sea. Just as we must respect nature in its demonic aspects, so too must we be aware of evil as it exists in human nature—or we make the mistake of his Billy Budd, whose "innocence" blinds him to the dangers that exist around him.

 

It is to Dostoevsky we look for a reconcil­iation between the growth of Marxism and the visitations of the Virgin in the nineteenth century. His first book, Poor Folk, was published in 1846, the year of Neptune's discovery; it is reminiscent of many other books published at this time in its compassionate concern for the plight of the poor and the underprivileged (for ex­ample, the writings of Charles Dickens).6 His House of the Dead (1862) anticipates the later writing of Solzhenitsyn with its depiction of the horrors of prison life in a penal colony in Siberia.
 
Like the Virgin Mary, Dostoevsky held out hope that the Russian nation would be converted to a religious way of life. In his soul, he believed that his native land was destined to be the spiritual leader of the world; he sought in his own writings to pave the way. Whereas the Virgin offers solace to a suffering humanity, in Dostoevsky and the above-mentioned writers, we have a por­traiture of what it is like to be a sinner, to undergo guilt feelings, neurotic sufferings, and despair.  
 
His Crime and Punishment (1866) is a novel about, sin, remorse, and redemption through sacrifice (Neptune).The Virgin often pleads with mankind to make sacrifices, to repent and seek for­giveness. It is as if Dostoevsky heard her prayers; and, like Christ, he has forgive­ness (Neptune) in his heart for those who blindly lose their way. At the same time; he feels compassion for the sufferings of even the most unregenerate sinner.
 
With the discovery of Neptune, the prin­ciple of compassion became a human attri­bute and was no longer a quality which we solely equate with a Christ or a Virgin Mary. The ability of these writers to iden­tify with the sufferings of others is not de­pendent on which religious sect these men adhere to, but rather on a belief that gen­uine compassion can only exist with aware­ness of man's capacity for both good and evil, as well as belief in a higher power.

 

From Dostoevsky we learn of the shadow side of scientific accomplishment. His Notes from the Underground (1864) and A Raw Youth (1875) point out the failure of science to provide a purpose for living be­yond the mere fulfillment of economic ne­cessities. (Neptune often provides an anti­dote for the excesses of Uranus.) In his The Possessed (1871-72), he finds fault with the left-wing reformers of his time. In this novel, suicide—which was kept out of sight in literature's own twelfth house during the 17th and 18th centuries—makes a dramatic appearance here as the book's intellectual heroes self-destruct without a belief in a higher purpose in life.
 
 It should be noted that suicide is also dealt with by Hawthorne in his Blithedale Romance (1852) and by Melville in his Pierre (1852). Along with Dostoevsky s The Possessed, these are among the first writers to deal with this aspect of the twelfth house since the 16th century.7
 
The absence of a belief in the spiritual too often leaves a void in which its anti­thesis, evil, makes an appearance, as wit­ness Dostoevsky's Antichrist, the Grand In­quisitor in his The Brothers Karamazov Here Dostoevsky shows the negative side of the interplay between Uranus and Nep­tune. In this book, Christ returns to earth and unobtrusively goes about his business healing people. He is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor and placed in jail, where the Antichrist explains to him the reasons he should never have returned to the planet.
 
The Inquisitor says that Christ made a mis­take in giving man freedom (Uranus), for the burden of deciding for himself what is good or evil is simply too much. This is the burden, which Adam brought on himself when he ate from the Tree of Knowledge and committed the original sin. Neptune is the Garden of Eden and also relates to prenatal life in the womb (wit­ness the growth in the study of embryology with Neptune's discovery). It is the period of time before self-awareness (Aries).

 

As psychologist Rollo May points out in Man's Search for Himself, the eating of the apple brought with it guilt feelings and anxiety and "the learning of right and wrong represents the birth of the psycho­logical and spiritual person."8 With the discovery of Neptune in the 19th century, anxiety and guilt once again literally be­come the heritage of every one of Adam's descendants. At the same time, man still has the burden of deciding for himself what is right and wrong.
 
But Neptune's reemergence into man's consciousness also brought with it the promise of a new Eden in the guise of the promises of socialism, Marxism, and even organized religion to have the collective abrogate the individual's responsibility to take care of himself and to make his own decisions, including those which affect his spiritual fate. The Inquisitor, as the totali­tarian master (Pluto), tells Christ that man would rather have bread and peace than the agony of being himself.
 
Unity in the guise of Neptune can lead to mass conformity and a passive depen­dence (Neptune) on an authority who ful­fills material needs (Saturn), while deny­ing freedom of choice (Uranus). Dostoev­sky is often noted for his psychological in­sights; yet he is a psychologist of the soul, of humans in conflict with both the divine and human aspects of their nature.

 

(Be sure to read Part 2 of this dissertation on Neptune )

1 For a detailed account of the Virgin's ap­pearances on earth, see A Woman Clothed with the

Sun, edited by John J. Delaney, Image Books, Garden City, New York, 1960. Subsequent

references to Mary's visitations in this article are based on this book.

 

2.Haeckel is also known for his study of invertebrate marine organisms—another Piscean

pursuit.

 

3. Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" was mankind's introduction to the Neptunian principle of

 

passive resistance  which later influenced Ghandi in India and Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil-rights movement. Neptune always has had a connection with the negro race and the abolition of slavery.

 

4 op. cit. A Woman Clothed with the Sun, pp. 194-195.

 

 

 5.  ibid, p. 82.

 

 6. This brief synopsis of Dostoevsky's writ­ings is partly derived from The New Co­lumbia Encyclopedia, Columbia Univer­sity Press, New York and London, 1975.

 

7 For a discussion of suicide in modern lit­erature, see R.W.B. Lewis' The Picaresque Saint, J.B

 

Lippencott Co. Philadelphia and New York, 1955. In his chapter on Albert Camus, he notes the

 

contribution of Melville, Hawthorne, and Dostoevsky towards an understanding of this subject.

 

 

8. Man's Search for Himself, Rollo May, Signet Books, New York, 1967, p. 157. I am endebted

 

to this author for his in­sights on the meaning of the Garden of Eden and his discussion of

 

Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.