Does The Discovery Of The Outer Planets Invalidate The Astrology Of The Ancients?

NEPTUNE  Part 2

The visitations of the Virgin during the 19th century might cause some skeptics to exclaim that Neptune is indeed the planet of impressionability and deception. To the religious believer, Mary has a long history of making appearances on Earth. That her appearances are occurring more frequently is only a sign that mankind is more needful than ever of her intercession. More startling for both believer and skeptic alike are the reported communications with the spirits of deceased persons who were not especially religious that occurred around the time of Neptune's discovery.

By Daniel Heydon

Eighteen forty-eight saw the beginnings of the movement known as spiritual­ism, which had its heydey during the 1850's, a time during which mediumship became widespread. It all started on March 3I, 1848, in Rochester, New York, when two young girls of the Fox family heard mysterious rappings in their home. Ac­cording to them, the strange noises came from the spirit of a peddler who told them he had been murdered by the house's pre­vious owner and occupant.  

 

If asked questions, such as the age of one of the sisters, the spirit would rap out the correct answer. Soon after, throughout the eastern seaboard, families would gather around the dining room table to see if they, too, could experience contact with the spirit world. The result of their ex­perimentations was that an epidemic of rappings began to be heard in homes across the country.

 

Other examples of psychic phenomena were  reported  around  the  same time. Poltergeists wreaked havoc on the occu­pants of a house in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1850. In the same period, the medium Daniel Home was observed on several occasions to rise perpendicularly in the air and float horizontally above the heads of the   people assembled   at his séances. Though   saints, such   as   Francis   and Teresa, have been known to levitate, it's a rare occasion when a secular person is known to have this kind of power.  

 

Once, the poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning were present at a Home's seance, and they were both touched by invisible hands. According to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a letter written to her sister: "At the request of the medium, the spiritual hand took from the table a garland which lay there and placed it upon my head. The particular hand which did thiswas of the largest human size, as white as snow and very beautiful.  It was as near to me as this hand I write with, and I saw it  distinctly.'' 1  Elizabeth felt that no spirit  belonging to her was present then.

 

 On another occasion at a sitting with Home, the people there saw and heard a guitar being played by apparently invisible hands. This was not an isolated phenomenon, for in October of 1849, at the Koones' family farm, a whole celestial orchestra of floating instruments gave a concert for the people there, but no one could recognize any of the tunes. 

 

During the 1850's, many mediums while  in trance spontaneously created and recited  original  poems in perfect meter, though seldom were these outpourings of the first rank. Often, historical personages spoke through the voice of a medium. Some intellectuals quickly became dis­illusioned with spiritualism when reported-celebrated persons of the past spoke of trivial things. For example, George Wash­ington would appear and recite an orig­inal poem but would be silent on the sub­ject of government and politics. Francis Bacon was a frequent visitor, too, but he said nothing to equal his work on earth before his death.

 

According to19th century witnesses,  not all spirits are spiritual. Often a spirit from the other side would fake the identity of a famous person and was not particularly adept at dissembling. Because spiritualism was in demand, it became a thriving business for many people.   Among  the mediums of the period some were proven to be fraudulent and others were victims of playful spirits who seemed to delight in putting on a hoax. It  would  seem  that  though  spiritualism gave evidence that the human personality survives beyond death, many of the spirits were just like ordinary folks alive, with personality quirks, idiosyncrasies, and quite human faults and good  points. In the mid-19th century, Neptune gained its reputation as being a planet associated with the vague, the confusing, the impres­sionable, and the sometimes deceitful.
 
Psychic phenomena were not seriously investigated again until 1882 with the creation of the London Society for Psychical Research by the philosopher-psychologist William James. However, not all  of the psychical manifestations at the time  of Neptune's discovery can be neatly dismissed as nonsense. Examples of medical  clairvoyance are as remarkable as the later work of Edgar Cayce. Some early investigators of psychic phenomena kept very accurate records of their findings, though their subject matter remains as mysterious today as it was then.
 
For example, in 1848, Alphonse Cahagnet published a book in French, which was translated into English in 1851 and pub­lished under the title The Celestial Tele­graph. Among other subjects, he gives a thoroughly documented account of the clairvoyant powers of a young woman, Adele Magnot.  Cahagnet presents more than forty cases in which Adele describes the physical characteristics and personal attributes of men and women as they were when alive on earth who were total strangers to her.
 
With the discovery of .Neptune, the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds was in part lifted. The medium (Neptune) takes his place alongside that of the priest (Jupiter) as an intermediary be­tween the visible and the invisible. Even if we remain skeptical about psychic phenomena, we are still left with the fact that with the discovery of the planet asso­ciated with the nonmaterial and the psy­chic, a widespread interest developed in these subjects.

                                       NEPTUNE AND SLAVERY

In 1843, Isabella Truth, a freed Negro slave working as a domestic in New York City believed she heard heavenly voices calling her to speak out for women's rights and the abolition of slavery. She left her job and changed her name to Sojourner Truth. Then she went about her mission preaching the causes she es­poused throughout the north.
   Concern about the plight of the Negro in America was one of the many humani­tarian issues that came into focus around the time of Neptune's discovery. In 1847, The Free Soil Party was formed in the United States with the demand that slav­ery not be allowed in the newly acquired territories gained from Mexico after our country's victory in the Mexican-Amer­ican War (1846-48).
 
That same year, Henry Ward Beecher became minister of the Plymouth Congre­gational Church in Brooklyn, New York. There he spoke out on the issues of slav­ery, evolution, and women's rights. His sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. This book was a major stimulus in the development of a genuine compassion for the Negro slave, and over 300,000 copies of the book were sold in one year.
 
Also, in 1847, the African colony Li­beria, became an independent nation. The word Liberia means "place of freedom." During the period 1822-1865, some 15,000 freed slaves settled there. Though it took more than the discovery of Neptune to bring Uranian civil rights for the Negro in America, the antislavery issue escalated into a major concern in America during the period 1846 to the Civil War
 
Neptune often completes the unfinished business of Uranus. The Industrial Revolution that gained momentum with the discovery of Uranus left in its path overcrowded cities with slum conditions and an impoverished working class in  Europe. The excesses of Uranian individ­ualism led inevitably to the rise of Nep­tunian socialism and a concern for the plight of the underprivileged.

 ORPHANS, CONVICTS, AND PRISON REFORM     

 With the discovery of Neptune, the planet associated with compassion, the world took a special interest in the victims of industrialization as well as other cast-off souls, such as orphans, criminals, the physically ill, and the mentally disturbed. (These matters are all twelfth-house con­cerns which come under the rulership of Neptune and the sign Pisces).
 
With the discovery of Neptune, the prac­tice began where governmental agencies became involved in the prevention of dis­ease. In 1848, the Public Health Act began sanitary legislation in England. Subse­quent legislation was passed dealing with slum clearance and minimum housing standards. In 1841, Dorothea Dix, after visiting a jail in East Cambridge, Massa­chusetts, began a campaign to end the practice of indiscriminately mixing the in­sane with criminals. Her personal crusade resulted in the founding of state hospitals for the insane in many states.
 
In 1856, the first foundling hospital in the United States was established in Bal­timore, Maryland. In 1846, Mary Carpen­ter, a British educator, opened a school for poor children; in 1852, she founded a juve­nile reformatory. Her crusade for reformatory and industrial schools paved the way for the passage of The Juvenile Offenders Act in1857.

 

Orphans and convicts abound in the lit­erature of Charles Dickens in such works as Oliver Twist (1838), Little Dorrit (1857), and Great Expectations (1860-1861). Dickens was a master of sentimentality and compassion.3 His Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843) still brings Nep­tunian tears in the eyes of the world every Christmas. Fellow novelist Charles Reade  described the cruelties of prison discipline in It's Never to Late to Mend (1856); Dostoyevsky did the same in Russia with The House of the Dead (1862), a record of his experiences in a penal colony.
 
With Jupiter as the ruler of Sagittarius (travel) and Pisces (incarceration) be­fore Neptune's discovery, a common mode of punishment was exile to a distant land, often to spend a life of hard labor. This practice which dates back to the Greeks and Romans continued to as late as 1951, with the exception of the Soviets, who still exiled people.to Siberia. The British sent certain types of prisoners to America until 1776 and to Australia until 1853. Devil's Island in the Caribbean is perhaps the most celebrated of the penal colonies; it was founded in 1852. The Dreyfus case in France in the 1890's brought to light the sordidness of prison life there .
 
Prior to the discovery of Neptune, prison life was viewed as a way of punishment. With Neptune in the picture, the function of imprisonment is to bring about the rehabilitation of the prisoner so that he may return to society. Convict labor gives way to vocational training. In the 20th century, the psychiatrist often testifies to the crim­inal's sanity; some criminologists believe that such factors as poverty and being born in a minority group are influences that cause antisocial behavior. In any case, the prevailing view is that criminals are victims of emotional disorders who must be treated rather than coerced and punished into better behavior.

 

 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND THE TELEGRAPH

Neptune is said to rule gases, the loss of consciousness, and compassion (an unlikely combination) until we realize that in 1846, the year of Neptune's discov­ery, William Morton at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston demonstrated the effectiveness of ether as an anesthetic to eliminate pain during surgery. In 1847, chloroform was first used as an anesthetic. (A related development which shows that Neptune is the ruler of gases occurred in 1850 when the Kinetic Theory of Gases was formulated.)
 
With the discovery of anesthesia and Louis Pasteur's experiments with bac­teria, which led to the germ theory of disease (1861), modem medicine was born. Also contributing to the understanding of disease was the work of Rudolf Virchow in cellular pathology; he founded the Archw fur patholigische Anatomic und Physiologie und fur kliniische Medizin in 1847. The father of cytology, Theodor Schwann, demonstrated that the cell is the basis of animal and plant tissue. His influ­ential "Microscopical Researches... in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants" was translated from the German a few months after Neptune's discovery.
 
In ancient times, it was believed that good and evil spirits affected the course of disease. With Jupiter then the sole ruler of the twelfth house, the sick were usually cared for in temples and houses of wor­ship. There was no real hospital for the training of nurses until 1846, when one was established at Kaiserwerth, Germany, at the time of Neptune's discovery. It was there that Florence Nightingale, the foun­der of modern nursing, received her train­ing. In 1860, she founded the Nightingale School and Home at St Thomas Hospital in London, the first school designed pri­marily to educate nurses rather than to provide nursing services for hospitals. In 1854, she organized a unit of thirty-eight nurses for service in the Crimean War.

 

Reports of the heroics of Nightingale's coterie over the newly discovered telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1844 made her a legend by the end of the war. Daily, the horrors of war, particularly the treat­ment of the wounded, were relayed by William Howard Russell, the first war correspondent, via telegraph to the Times of London. For the first time in history, an aroused public became aware of what war was really like. Pity and indignation led to cries for a more humane treatment of the sick. Nightingale was the first wom­an to be given the British Order of Merit (1907). After her death, The Crimean Monument at Waterloo Place in London was erected in her honor (1915).
 
 As Marshall McLuhan states in his Un­derstanding Media, "the electric [Uranus] gives powerful voices to the weak and suf­fering" [Neptune].4 He further says that instant information gives immediate par­ticipation in the experience of others; in other words, it creates empathy. The rel­evance of McLuhan's insights about how "the medium is the message" was brought borne with the Vietnam War as pre­sented on TV's nightly news. Editorial comment on the right of America's in­volvement seemed superficial since mil­lions of people saw the wounded and the homeless on their screens every night. It goes without saying that one was moved to care about one's fellowman, regardless of race, color, creed, right or wrong.

KIERKEGAARD AND THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY

The psychologist Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety tells us that anx­iety as we know it today did not emerge as an individual problem until the mid-19th century 5 (i.e. until Neptune's discovery).  In ancient times, primitive man experienced anxiety when his physi­cal well-being was threatened by wild ani­mals. (If some students of astrology scoff at the fact that the ancients attributed to the twelfth house and the sign Pisces large animals, their skepticism will be alleviated with a reading of May's book.)
 
In the Middle Ages, the promise of sal­vation by religion under Jupiter's benefi­cent rulership of the twelfth house did much to obviate anxiety. People then were afraid of sorcerers and magic, but a belief in God and the hope (Jupiter) of heaven did much to allay a fear of the unknown (Neptune). If one paid attention to the rules and regulations of the church, one need not fear eternal damnation. Besides, there was also the Sacrament of Confes­sion through which one received God's forgiveness and simultaneously could deal with guilt feelings. Sometimes anxiety did  not make itself felt until the moment of death, and the church's archives are full of deathbed repentances.

Before going further, we should dis­tinguish between fear and anxiety. Fear is a realistic response to actual danger and is Saturnian by nature. With anxiety, we enter Neptune's realm, for often the true source of distress is unknown to the indi­vidual. When we are plagued with vague fears without any specific threats coming from the outside, that is anxiety. Since psychology did not exist as an in­dependent study until the late 19th cen­tury, we have to look at the writings of philosophers and religious thinkers for insights into psychological problems.(Ju­piter, the planet associated with religion and philosophy, was the sole ruler of the  twelfth house of the unconscious prior to Neptune's discovery in 1846.)

According to May, the philosophers of the 17th century believed that reason could solve all problems. Isolation, which is a twelfth-house concern, was not a prob­lem for the person of the 17th century. It was thought then that "the liberation or reason in every person would lead to a realization of a universal humanity and to a system of harmony between individuals and society." 6 If a person listened to his reason, be would ultimately be in accord with others who followed their reason. That the laws of the external universe as well as the physical body could be dis­cerned by reason left the 17th century man with little to worry about In time, every­thing would become known through rea­son and mathematical laws.

May goes on to note the difference be­tween the 17th century and the 19th cen­tury man regarding anxiety: "With respect to the psychological life of the individual, the nineteenth century is broadly charac­terized by a separation of 'reason' and 'emotions,' with voluntaristic effort (will) enthroned as the method of casting the decision between the two—which resulted generally in a denial of emotions." The seventeenth-century belief in the rational control of the emotions had now become the habit of repressing the emotions. 7

 

The stage was set for Kierkegaard to write The Concept of Anxiety in 1844 and for man to learn more about his hid­den motivations and repressions as sig­naled by the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
 
Kierkegaard was the first writer ever to identify and to discuss the concept of anx­iety. Unlike many modern individuals who believe that if they experience anxiety, something must be wrong with them, Kierkegaard believed that it's perfectly normal—in fact, necessary—to experience anxiety, for it is part of the creative pro­cess of becoming a self.
 
Kierkegaard's discussion of anxiety re­lates Uranian freedom with Neptunian anxiety. To realize one's potentialities in­volves change (Uranus) and to face the unknown brings with it anxiety (Nep­tune). The child in learning to walk ex­periences anxiety because he has not done this before. This kind of anxiety for Kierkegaard is normal anxiety. The more creative a person is, the more anxiety he is going to experience.
 
For Kierkegaard, "confidence [Jupiter} is not the removal of doubt (and anxiety) [Neptune) but rather the attitude that we can move ahead despite doubt and anx­iety." 8 In other words, "this capacity for freedom brings with it anxiety." 9  To con­front the possibilities of life always in­volves anxiety, but not to confront them leads to neurotic anxiety "which results from the individual's failure to move ahead in situations of normal anxiety." 10
 
Saturn, too, enters the picture. To move towards the future to realize untapped potentials always involves a break with the past (Saturn) and accompanying guilt feelings (Saturn) in the process. But not to take a chance on growing can also lead to guilt feelings towards the self.  A belief in fate (Saturn) is sometimes used to avoid the anxiety and guilt feelings that go along with creativity. In the end, one atones for his break with the status quo by the creative act itself, which transforms the past by incorporating it into the future.

 

Anxiety is a signal from within that a problem is going on, but as long as this occurs, it means a solution is possible. Kierkegaard believes that anxiety (Nep­tune) is a greater teacher than reality (Saturn), for one can always try to escape (Neptune) reality (Saturn) by avoiding problems. Attempts to run away from anx­iety are literally self-defeating, for it is like an inner voice, which if listened to, can lead to growth and self-realization.
 
With Kierkegaard, the twelfth house is no longer simply the territory of madmen and those who are shut away from the world either by themselves or society. Rather, it is the source of inner richness that helps us realize our creativity.

It was left to Freud to deal in detail with the hang-ups associated with the twelfth house, yet in the first man to write about this hidden side of the self, we have one of our best guides to a constructive real­ization of hidden twelfth-house possibil­ities. The twelfth house with Kierkegaard becomes a buried treasure rather than a haven of neuroses.

Finally, in Kierkegaard, both the Jupiterian and Neptunian aspects of the twelfth house are neatly blended. The individual who dares to confront normal anxiety (Neptune) and goes on to the future de­spite inner doubt in the process is, in the words of May, "educated to faith [Jupiter] and inner certitude."11 At that point, the individual, in the words of Kierkegaard, has the "courage to renounce anxiety without any anxiety [Neptune], which only faith [Jupiter] is capable of—not that it annihilates anxiety, but remaining ever young, it is continually developing itself out of the death throe of anxiety."12

1.The Heyday of Spiritualism by Slater Brown, Hawthorn Books, New York, 1970, p. 233. This and all other references to spiritualism are from this book.

2. It should be noted that Dickens was not solely concerned with twelfth-house subjects, but that his work is Neptunian in other ways besides. In 1850, Herbert Spencer invented sociology. In the writ­ings of Dickens and his contemporary, Balzac in France, we get a complete por­traiture of the different types of people who make up a society. With Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky, the cities of London, Paris, and St Petersburg are the real heroes.

 

3. Louis Pasteur also did other scientific experiments which are Piscean in na­ture. His work on wine, vinegar, and beer, all of which come under the do­main of Pisces, resulted in the process of pasteurization. Liquor and drugs are of­ten used for Neptunian escapes from reality. With Neptune's discovery, the state of Maine was the first state to adopt a prohibition law in 1851. Also barbituric acid, which forms the basis of barbituates, was discovered in 1864.

 

4. Understanding Media by Marshall Mc-Luhan, New American Library, Signet Books, New York, 1964, p. 223. "The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May, Pocket Books, New York, 1979, p. 19.

 

5.ibid, p. 22.

 

6. ibid,p.29.  

      

7.ibid, p. 25.

 

8.ibid, p. 32.

 

 9.bid, p. 33.

 

10 ibid, p. 43.

 

 

 11. ibid., From The Concept of Anxiety by Rollo May

 

12.Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted by Rolio May on pp. 43-44.