Neptune and Oil Spills

Neptune governs oil, among other things. So, when there were two major oil spills over the weekend, one in San Francisco Bay, and another in the Black Sea, astrologers began looking at the bigger picture (the outer planets). Linda Rose looks at Uranus in Pisces, calling its era "Water Gone Wild" in her post, oily birds make me cry. They make me cry, too, and I'm sure those images are painful to all that love the natural world.

Lately, I've been reading Jessica Murray's book Soul-Sick Nation, in which she looks at geopolitical events through the lens of astrology. And since she also lives in the Bay Area, I decided to get her take on the oil spills. We talked about collective denial, and how we're aware that oil as an energy damages the planet via its extraction and fumes, yet the dependency continues. But here it is up in our faces, in the immediate environment, cracking through that denial, fouling the beaches.

Writes Murray, "The hideous oil spills in San Francisco Bay and the Black Sea occurred just before and after the New Moon this month, when Neptune (oil) was squaring both the Sun and the Moon. It seems to be an early expression of the big bombshell transit of the season -- Jupiter conjunct Pluto -- which were seven degrees apart when the first spill occurred."

"Jupiter expands whatever it touches, while Pluto symbolizes the dark laws of destruction/renewal. All things Plutonian are expressed in exaggerated form under skies like these. The sheer size of the Black Sea spill -- the very name is a hybrid of Pluto (the color black) and Neptune (governor of the sea) -- said to be the third largest in history, and the proximity to urban shores of the one in San Francisco, makes these oil spills perversely successful. It puts the epitomical archetypal dread of humanity - the spectre of ecocide -- right in our face, writ large (Jupiter)."

Murray calls astrology a spiritual language through which we can understand cosmic principles. Studying the slow-moving outer planets helps us take the long view. Sometimes happenings like these shock us awake, turning a tragedy into a catalyst for change in the end.