Sailor Neptune

significations

compassion

the other one’s trouble, landing as yoursThe warmest thing modern astrology gives Neptune, and it runs on the same softening everything else here does, turned toward another person. When the edge between you and someone else goes, their situation stops being information and starts being something felt.It shows up as reading a room before anyone has spoken, as being moved by a stranger’s trouble out of all proportion to one’s stake in it, and as the difficulty of putting down what was only ever picked up by accident.

imagination

fantasy, inspiration, the picture firstModern astrology hands Neptune the imagination and calls it the higher octave of Venus: art met by immersion rather than by judgement. Where Venus likes a thing, Neptune disappears into it.It shows up as music and image and reverie, and as the knack for picturing what is not there yet, which is the same faculty that makes a person easy to lead somewhere that does not exist.

delusion

confusion, and believing the pictureThe dark end of the modern list. An illusion is a likeness that convinces; delusion is the point where the likeness is taken for the thing itself. Confusion is the same failure in a milder form: with no edge between what is and what is wished for, there is nothing to check an impression against.It shows up as a wish or a fear mistaken for a fact, as a certainty that does not survive daylight, and as a fog a person cannot say when they entered.

mysticism

faith, and the self going quietJupiter is belief: doctrine, scripture, the institution, the law that can be stated and taught and argued over. Neptune is faith, which is the part that dissolves the structure. The moderns give it the mystic, the medium, and the vanishing of the self.It shows up as a practice that empties rather than fills, as devotion with no argument behind it, and as something that happened which the person afterwards cannot put into words and will not stop trying to.