Neptune represents the transcendent principle and the urge to merge with something greater than yourself. It takes about 165 years to transit the whole zodiac and spends about 14 years in each sign. That means you won’t experience Neptune transiting every house in your chart because he’ll only get about halfway around, depending on how long you live.

Neptune will cover about 6 houses in 84 years (the length of a whole Uranus cycle) and forms a regular pattern of transits to his own natal placement. You will never experience a Neptune return but if you live long enough you might have a half-return. The Neptune sextile happens in your late 20s, followed by the square in your early 40s, the trine in your early 50s, and finally the opposition in your early 80s.

Neptune represents your need for transcendence and the desire for redemption through unity with an ideal. It’s associated with spirituality and mysticism, the creative expression of imagination, dreams and fantasy, as well as illusion, deception, madness and addiction.

Transits don’t show specifically what will manifest, but they do show how the energy is released. Neptune releases energy slowly by refining, spiritualising and sensitising, but also undermining and dissolving whatever it touches. This energy is emotional and heart-centred so you can’t make sense of it with the logical mind – you can only surrender to the flow.

Neptune dissolves the structures and boundaries of Saturn making things vague, confusing, slippery, and mysterious. It opens your consciousness to other levels of reality and reveals the limitations and illusions of your ordinary perception. This can feel blissful and ecstatic or overwhelming and terrifying as you become more sensitive to other dimensions and states of consciousness.

If you’re attuned to Neptune, you may feel the energy of his transits coming a long way off, maybe 5 degrees away or more. Stephen Forrest uses a 7-degree orb, although the effects can be hard to pin down because they’re so diffuse and formless.

Neptune creeps up on you, like water seeping into the cracks, and infiltrates through your blind spots. The ground may dissolve so slowly that you don’t notice and then suddenly your feelings begin moving in another direction because your inner landscape has transformed and you don’t have a map of the new territory yet.

This is very disorienting and hard to navigate. In her article, Neptune and Wandering (pdf), Julia Mihas explains that as Neptune moves towards a natal planet you can become captivated by a dream or ideal. Later in the transit Neptune dissolves the dream and you become disillusioned.

“Neptune tests reality by conflating it with your dreams or fears. When it exactly aspects a point in your chart, you are at the fever pitch of confusion, delusion and stagnation.”

This is Neptune’s way of revealing your illusions and then waking you up to reality. You have to fall for the fantasy and get trapped by your illusions before you can be freed from them. It tests your ego by encouraging attachments and then denying them:

“Neptune often makes things appear much better or worse than they are. … [He] awakens a dream or fear to which you fervently cling and then dissolves it.”

Obviously, this isn’t necessarily a pleasant process and it’s not usually a good idea to make big changes to your life (if you can help it). But if you can see that what you’re really looking for is a higher spiritual reality or truth then you can reframe your desire for transcendence and find a positive ideal to align with.

Neptune increases your sensitivity to atmospheres and opens your heart to the suffering of others. You may feel more compassionate and want to get involved with charity work or helping those less fortunate than yourself. But you won’t necessarily get any thanks for it – you don’t win prizes for being selfless! If you want recognition for your good deeds then they’re not good deeds – you’re being manipulative and self-serving, the opposite of what’s needed.

This can lead to disillusionment and wake you up to how selfish you really are underneath all the ‘spiritual’ posturing and virtue signalling. It’s an example of spiritual narcissism where you believe what you want to believe because it feels good. This can turn into spiritual bypassing where you use spiritual practices to avoid facing painful feelings or difficult situations.

When you’re in a confused state you’re more susceptible to deception and could be misled by dodgy gurus or unscrupulous spiritual teachers who tell you what you want to hear. You could also feel so guilty that you martyr yourself doing too much for others in a misguided attempt at reparation or self-sacrifice in order to gain redemption.

The Neptune desire for redemption is linked to feelings of divine homesickness or being cast out of Eden and yearning to return to a state of unity and bliss. This is really an attempt to escape the limitations of the physical world and the feeling of separateness. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to do this – constructive and life-enhancing or destructive and regressive – and most people will do a mixture of both.

It often becomes linked to the need for sacrifice, to make something sacred by letting go of whatever you believe is preventing you from returning to Paradise. But this won’t work if you think you’re going to get something out of it. You can’t make a bargain with God – if I give this up, I’ll be rewarded with bliss – that’s just self-deception.

In ‘The Astrological Neptune’, Liz Greene says that

“it is only when one gives up one’s claim to the lost Paradise that any real sacrifice can begin. Paradoxically, the thing which must be given up is the hope of redemption.”

You have to offer yourself up without any hope of redemption or release from suffering. (This is the essence of the dark night of the soul, BTW.) But that doesn’t mean you have to give up being happy. You just stop arguing with reality and accept things as they are – which is harder than it sounds! 😅

Neptune encourages you to turn inwards to find the ideal that you’re looking for but then you have to make it real by manifesting it in your life in some way – not just disappear into a daydream or fantasy world. Being spaced out and away with the fairies may seem like fun at first, but the consequences of checking out can be devastating.

During Neptune transits it can feel as if you’re dreaming while awake. You may have trouble concentrating and keep drifting off, or struggle to focus or get things done. You may become disorganised and discombobulated. This may be more likely if you’re not grounded in the physical world, but it can also happen when there’s something you need to release, as Stephen Arroyo explains:

“the confusion or ‘spaced out’ feeling…develops chiefly when one is resisting the inevitable disintegration and dissolution of some pattern in our life or some aspect of our personality.”

Even genuine spiritual inspiration and visions may be disruptive and disorienting but the meaning of them and their importance will stay with you long after the transit is over if you can ground it in your life and integrate it into your being.

You can do this by testing your dreams and inspiration to see if they can be lived in reality. This takes self-discipline, hard work and time, i.e. Saturn, as well as the discernment and positive discrimination of Virgo.

You also need these disciplines in order to give form to your imagination through creative work, such as writing novels, making music, films or art. You don’t have to be a professional to do this – you can do it for fun. You can also learn how to use your imagination to create the life you want and stop using it to indulge fantasies that waste your energy.

If you don’t find a way to ground Neptune’s energy it can send you doolally and lead to disintegration, emotional problems, depression, psychosis, drug abuse and addiction, or just a general malaise and discontent that makes it difficult to hold down a job or find your place in the world. You become ‘Lost in Music’ – caught in a trap! No turning back!

The confusion and uncertainty of Neptune transits ultimately encourage you to search for a deeper or higher spiritual truth. This won’t necessarily explain what’s going on or give you clarity but it puts your experience into a cosmic perspective that gives it meaning.

You may need to learn how to wait for things to become clear and this will allow you to develop greater trust in the process. You can learn to go with the flow of events and have faith that clarity will return and that life will flow where it needs to go.

Over the next few weeks we’ll explore Neptune transits in the houses and to the natal planets…

More on Neptune:

• Planet Myths: the Story Behind Neptune
• Keywords for Neptune
• Neptune in Aries

References:

• Astrology, Karma & Transformation – Stephen Arroyo
• The Gods of Change – Howard Sasportas
• The Astrological Neptune – Liz Greene

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