Venus and Neptune really know how to distinguish themselves from the other celestial bodies in the heavens. They are easily the most glamorous, exotic, and slinkiest of all the planets. Being graceful and feminine, they beckon us, seduce us through our own imagination. Venus comes to us wearing form-fitting, sinuous dresses that cling to her body, while Neptune wears nothing at all.
The two intimately connect with each other by sharing a common theme. Both seek to enhance our capacity to delight in being alive, despite the hardships. Their pursuit is one of harmony, bringing love to the forefront, but they achieve their objectives in very different ways.
This is because, in astrological terms, Neptune is a transpersonal planet, and regarded as the higher octave of Venus, while Venus is a personal planet and thus the lower octave of Neptune. The personal planets Mercury, Venus and Mars orbit closely around the Sun and shape our personality, and the way others view us.
Transpersonal planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto orbit much further from the Sun and can not be viewed without the aid of a telescope. Being far from our location here on Earth, the influences they exert must be so powerful as to travel unfathomable distances to reach us. Their potency and power is impossible to resist, it seeps into our subconscious and initiates intense, personal transformative experiences.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine there is an expression the nearer, the farer; the farther, the nearer. It means that seemingly distant, and out of sight influences exert a greater, yet more subtle, pull on our being. Whereas influences closer to us, the ones so common to our everyday experience, are taken for granted because of their familiarity.
For example, your love for someone you see everyday may not flower until that person is gone. Up until their absence, their daily appearance went largely unappreciated. If we live solely in the small universe of our personal planets, we start believing that all that is important, exists only in our own exclusive, subjective world. The transpersonal planets hit hard, leaving us in shock and awe, forcing us to question everything we thought we knew. We can no longer assume something is true without testing it first. Doggedly we climb to higher ground, obtaining a wide-angled, objective view.
Octaves in astrology refer to the frequency that a planet vibrates at. A planet that is a higher octave of another vibrates much more quickly than the lower one, and raises the common themes they represent from a personal to a Universal level. The shared themes transcend the ordinary to provoke extraordinary sensations and experiences, with the potential to develop the spiritual and emotional sides of ourselves.
Venus is the brightest, most luminous celestial object in the heavens. With her unwavering light, she doesn’t twinkle like a star, but she outshines every other object in the sky, except for the Sun and Moon. Her celestial body casts a magnetic force, attracting our eyes, casting them upwards to glimpse her shine. The best times to get an eyeful of Venus are right before sunrise or just after sunset.
The Goddess of Love further sets herself apart from all the rest with a peculiar behavior of hers. She dares to be different by slowly rotating in a clockwise direction, while all the other planets in the Solar System except for Uranus, move in a counterclockwise direction. On her world, the sun sets in the East and rises in the West.
Living on Venus, every day would be a quest for instant gratification, a rush of indulgences and the fulfillment of as many sensual pleasures as possible. Anything that gratifies our five senses, and leads to satisfaction, and satiation, whether through obtaining beautiful objects, pleasing relationships, sexual union or Epicurean means. A true Epicurean strictly devotes oneself to sensual enjoyment, especially through food and drink.
The Goddess of Love represents what we value, what we enjoy and who we value and enjoy. She is our power of magnetism- what we attract and how we attract. She thrives on joy, and creates it through art, love, poetry and symmetry. With strong Venusian influences, we would heavily identify with what brings us pleasure. Any threat disrupting this hedonism would be met with outrage and indignation.
The dark side could fester as Venus easily forgets about the virtue of temperance, and tend towards overindulgence. Underneath the make-up, red blotches and puffy eyes prevail, under the expensive clothing, weak and underused muscles lie slack.
No one wants to clean their own home, yet everyone wants a scrubbed and spotless house they can show off. Venus lures hordes of workers from Mercury because there’s always plenty of work to do. They are paid generous sums to maintain the services that keep the cities running, do the heavy lifting, help the Venusians file during tax season, and basically take care of all the mundane, daily chores. The duller parts of reality can take the sparkle out of Venus’s eyes so she’s willing to pay others a premium for keepimg her world shiny and beautiful.
Venus is literally, and figuratively, the hottest planet in the solar system, as her average temperature is 864 F/463 C. Her surface temperature is even greater than that of Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. Normally surface temperatures decrease the further away from the sun a planet is, but again Venus stands out, like a rose amongst the thorns, her thermometer reading is by far the highest. The next highest is from Mercury, coming in at a mere 333 F/167 C.
How does Venus manage to sizzle? Even scientists debate why this is so, although it probably has to do with her atmosphere. In scientific terms atmosphere is defined as a layer of gases surrounding an astronomical object, held in place by the gravity of the object.
Her atmosphere is so thick it generates the greenhouse effect, so she doesn’t let warmth escape from her embrace and keeps the heat close to her heart. Things get so hot on Venus that she can melt lead just by her very being. Metaphorically speaking, Venus is ripe and dripping with a heavy atmosphere, in this case defined as a pleasurable and interesting mood. She probably heavily romanticizes the greater virtues of Neptune, and dreams of visiting there.
Although, it’s a struggle to reach Neptune, requiring advanced technology and lots of patience, as the travel time is 12 to 14 years from Earth- from Venus it would actually take a tiny bit longer. For beams of sunlight, the journey is much shorter, taking only four years to go from the Sun to Neptune. It would also be a struggle to take-off and land there, since Neptunian winds barrel along at a whopping 1200 miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier! Thus, taking first prize for the solar system’s strongest wind storms.
Complicating a nice, neat landing and takeoff even further, is the fact that it’s almost impossible to find a discernible surface on which to place the spacecraft. Neptune is a gas giant, like Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter, so none of them can boast a solid surface. At their center is a small rocky core, essentially amounting to boiling puddles of molten rock, and surrounding that is a vast ocean of ammonia.
On Neptune extremes rule the day with an absolutely frigid, frozen atmosphere on top, and below a core smouldering hot at about 10,000 F/ 5,537 C. The gaseous, foggy atmosphere gradually extends downwards, transforming into a heavy, dense, simmering hot ocean made up of ammonia, methane and water. Amazingly, underneath this roiling ocean there is a layer of swirling, dancing diamonds! This holds true for Uranus as well.
This simultaneously freezing and boiling planet, with no solid surface, and containing a deep layer where it rains down diamonds, is where mysticism, Universal Love and illusions soar. There are no boundaries between the spirit world and the physical one, reality is illusory, and always just out of grasp.
Communication occurs on the psychic level, through dreams and feelings. Intuition replaces logic, as the heart replaces the mind. Rational thought and logic play no part in this landscape, or more correctly put- this dreamscape.
When you can’t feel the ground beneath your feet, uncertainty and fear may take root in such a precarious environment. Collapse or falling seems imminent, and new ways of being, and coping, must manifest. Somewhere within Neptune’s embrace, boundaries dissolve and it becomes possible to sail past the physical realm and enter the mystical one. Chaos, unpredictability and panic ultimately forces a surrender, to unconditionally accept the many things out of our control, and beyond our rational understanding. Offering no resistance, faith enters our being like a knife cutting through warm butter.
The deep, azure blue of Neptune is reminiscent of the sky from the perspective of Earth. Another similarity between the two planets is both their axis of rotation is tilted by 28 degrees. This means the four seasons abound on Neptune as well, although they last about 40 years each, as a full Neptunian year is almost 165 years.
Some semblance of our reality on Earth, however loose, can be a lifeline to connect us to the hard, three-dimensional, physical world we left behind. We can’t forget that our spirit incarnates into a body, and the body is sacred too. It’s not just the numinous, ethereal part of us that is divine. Neptune dissolves all the barriers to our subconscious, and that can include the physical aspect of ourselves as well.
Corporeal needs and desires can also lead us to a form of enlightenment, and they must be honored. If not, we run the risk of escapism, going to great lengths to avoid pain, and generally trying to escape harsh realities. Upon our death, our souls merge once again with the formless, faceless One-ness from which everything originates. This is a space where there is no conception of I AM, let alone the concept of me, myself or I. Vague, nebulous and all-consuming, this is part and parcel for the Neptunian experience.
If we want to swim in Neptunian waters while we’re still here on Earth, there are plenty of activities to dive into. We’re there, wading in her ocean, when we meditate, dream, make love, listen to music, write poetry, engage in acts of compassion, earnestly tap into our creative potential, marvel at nature, enter altered states of consciousness, get lost in ecstatic dance or take psychoactive substances like marijuana or LSD.
To actually visit Neptune may be so overwhelming, it could be like playing in the ocean at low-tide one minute, only to be submerged by a surprise tsunami the next. Being so far from the Sun, the brightest part of the day there would look like the dim twilight hour back on Earth. The light on Earth is nearly 900 times brighter than the sunlight gracing Neptune.
There are precious few anchors linking us to our earthly reality, so the danger of never being able to leave Neptune is extremely high. Even with a return ticket back to the Third Rock from the Sun, promises may be made to come back, but not often kept.
Life on Neptune may feel more like a dream, but it’s really an extraordinary, mystical journey. Compassion, faith and trust fulfil the requirements needed to take the Journey of the Mystic. We are spurred on and enticed by a vague, yet deep sense of belonging to something powerful, profound and good. Neptune tempts by making us believe we can align with the cosmic consciousness and Universal Love.
However, here, as always, with the pursuit of dreams and fantasies, no matter how noble, it is all too easy to get swallowed up by the watery, dreamy, boundaryless world. Along the mystical path, difficulties arise in distinguishing real from imaginary entities, as distortions of time and space crop up. Illusions and hallucinations crowd the way, as our senses trick us into seeing things not as they really are.
Even if we manage to straighten our thinking for a quick moment, and see through the smoke and mirrors, we are not safe. Grand delusions set in, making us see things that aren’t even there at all, leading us to believe in false images. We may crumble, overwhelmed and trapped in our worst nightmares.
How are scenarios that defy logic dealt with? How willing are you to ride into unseen realms? This foggy, mystical environment enchants even the most hardened realist. When the edges of reality blur, imagination soars, vast reservoirs of empathy become accessible, and the potential for attainment of a higher spiritual state opens up. Intuition flourishes as an easily accessible, and reliable, source of wisdom.
Here you will never know where land, ocean or air begin and end. But it doesn’t matter anymore. The only thing of importance is harmonizing with the distortions in perception. When diamonds fall from places beneath an ocean- magic, creativity and wonderfulness are also in play. When we see light reflected on water and it sparkles like translucent gems, we know it’s an illusion but awe fills all the empty spaces in our being, giving us a transcendent experience. This inspires us into expressing our wonder and reverence through poetry, art or music.
At their highest potential, both Venus and Neptune bestow favors and fortune, by bringing the experience of love to our fingertips and into the core of our being. They make sure to deliver us opportunities that shed the ordinary, and raise us up to the extraordinary. They show us how to delight in being a spiritual creature encapsulated by a physical body. Until the journey to these planets becomes viable, we can earnestly absorb their formidable power from the sanctuary of Earth.
