Neptune Moves On

For the last couple of years transiting Neptune has been moving back and forth in an opposition aspect to natal Neptune in the Sibly horoscope for the United States. (Click on Sibly to see the chart.) Neptune aspects are always prolonged and their influence is often cumulative. You don’t see how much trouble they’ve caused until you get close to the end.

Neptune can be the planet of mystical visions, but it can also be the planet of irrational hopes and beliefs. Neptune plays with our perception of reality. Under its influence we see only what we want to see and count as real only what we want to be real. Too much of this and you can end up living in a reality in which facts and experience don’t matter. Everything is filtered through your Neptunian conception of what is true.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that this long Neptune transit in the U.S. chart has created a situation in which Americans seem to be living in two separate and opposing (it is an opposition, after all) versions of reality. There are certainly variation within these versions of reality, they are both based on beliefs and assumptions that have more to do what we wish was true than what is really happening.

This is not to say that living in different realities is something new in American history. Actually, it is quite common. For example the reality that an abolitionists in the 1840s was living in was quite difference from the reality in which a slave owner in the 1840s was living. However, in the past one reality always dominated. In the 1840s that was the slave owner’s reality, but by the 1860s that reality was faltering and the abolitionist’s reality took over, This jockeying back and forth of different realities is what American political history is all about.

What has happened to the country during Neptune’s opposition to the U.S natal Neptune, however, is that we have created two realities that are just about equal in terms of the people who ascribe to them. If you’re not sure about that, look at what happened in the 2022 elections. We had races decided hundreds of votes and we ended up with a Congress that is close to evenly divided, with Democrats with a slight advantage in the Senate and Republicans with a small edge in the House of Representatives.

I think that what going to happen in 2023, as this Neptune opposition separates and fades into history, is that American politics is going to revert to the old norm. In other words, one of these two realities is going to take the dominant position and the other will begin to fade. Will it be the reality that you favor? That remains to be determined. The thing to remember is that no reality is going to dominate forever. Without Neptune gumming up the works, the situation will remain fluid, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.