Drawing Inspiration

Post by Jane Lewis

At the tail end of March Neptune shifts into Aries where it will remain for the best part of twenty years.  Neptune must blend itself with the very different energy of Mars, a tricky mix like oil and water.  Water threatens to extinguish fire’s dynamism, and water’s sensitivity is at risk of being dried up.  Not only is there the elemental clash, but Pisces and Aries stand next to one another in the zodiacal sequence and, paradoxically, are furthest apart for Aries marks the beginning of the soul’s journey and Pisces the end.  Aries births a new cycle of becoming whereas Pisces brings one to its conclusion.    Aries and Pisces are like alpha and omega and can be symbolised by the ouroboros, the serpent that bites and swallows its own tail.  It symbolises the eternal circle of death and rebirth, of disintegration and re-integration, where the end is the beginning in an eternal round.

As a generational and transpersonal planet, Neptune’s ingress will bring many societal changes which will be largely brought about by the generation of babies born in the coming years.  The extent to which any individual child will bear its energetic imprint will be shown largely by how strongly Neptune aspects their personal planets and chart angles.

Just as the ouroboros symbolises eternity, almost infinite are the ways in which Neptune in Aries might manifest, but what we can expect to see is tension.  In itself tension is neither good nor bad.  In the horoscope it’s shown by hard aspects based upon the ‘squareness’ of the number four through the hard aspects of opposition and square.  Tension is a fact of life that arises naturally when material form emerges from nothingness of space.  One area we can expect to see great developments is in the field of art through a renaissance of artistic expression.  Although Mars and Neptune are inimical at one level, they both share vision and imagination.

Exercise: take a blank piece of paper and look at it for a few moments.  Draw a single point, or dot, anywhere then sit back and look again. Observe the tension that spontaneously arises from seeing that some-thing rise up out of no-thing.  See how the mark insistently draws attention to itself.  In a sense, the blank sheet is the original, undifferentiated, formlessness that is in the beginning that’s always beginning: it is the no-thing that Neptune stands for.  Primal virgin emptiness.

In the last artistic Renaissance this was depicted by the image of Madonna and Child.  In Spain there is a tradition of sculpting Black Madonnas, such as that at Montserrat.  And in the biblical Song of Songs we find the words “I am black and beautiful”.  These have nothing to do with racial skin colour, or religion even, and everything to do with metaphysics.  This is the soul world, the sea of universal consciousness from which everything is born.  The seeming emptiness of the Virgin space is actually full of latent potential to birth Matter, she is the prima materia, the Divine Mother, pregnant with Child conceived immaculately, waiting to be born from the pure virgin state.  This isn’t a one-off event but describes the eternal process of Creation, happening all the time in and around us.

Neptune and the Moon belong together as soul mates, as we can see from Neptune’s glyph which is made from the semi-circle of the Moon floating on the Cross of Matter, forming what looks like a trident. The point, or dot, erupts from the sea of nothingness and bursts forth to form a differentiated, identity separate from its source, the blank page.  Like Mars, agent of the solar consciousness of the Sun and Uranus.  The glyph of Mars shows the individuated life-force thrusting away from the circle, or point, like an arrow up and out of undifferentiated nothingness into somethingness.  Creating our world of forms, of things.

We can now draw some thing: put your pencil back on the dot you made earlier and draw a straight line in any direction, then pause and make a second line at any angle, and then a third  back to the first dot, making a triangle.  You can repeat the exercise by drawing another shape: four lines of a square.  A few extra lines quickly transforms them into three dimensional objects with volume: a couple more lines added to the triangle reveals the pyramid: Fire/Mars.  And from the square a cube: Earth/Saturn.  By the end of May this year Saturn will join Neptune in Aries.

As soon as three dimensional forms surge out of the empty page we become mesmerised, tricked and seduced into believing that what we’re looking at is reality.   Despite knowing it’s just an illusion we’re still entranced by the magic and fall under the spell of matter.  The stage of the world is immediately set up before our eyes and our focus shifts entirely away from the original source and latches onto objects, our imagination running away with us, sucking us into myriad stories of our own invention. 

Neptune represents the imagination and our artistic faculty, which is essentially a deception.  Art means artifice, what’s artificial and unreal.  The skill of the artist is to give the illusion that what we see on the canvas is real life despite our knowing it isn’t.  The same is true of film and photography.  We’re looking at clever trickery which greatly amuses the mind and imagination, sometimes helping us to see new dimensions of existence, but as often deceiving us into believing something untrue, unreal or completely false.  Paradoxically, it is astrological Saturn that challenges our faulty ways of seeing reality and pushes us back onto the path of apprehending real truth.  Fundamentally, this is the purpose of the Saturn transits we experience which serve to help us re-set our focus on what’s real and true. 

Of Neptune in Aries we might draw inspiration from the saying ‘my ending is my beginning’.  For established or practising artists great things might come from going back to basics in order to see old forms, old practices and old subjects as if seeing them for the very first time.  For new, budding artists, like the coming generation of children, the time is ripe for opening up innovative new vistas that might help humanity to see our world with new eyes and penetrate the misty veil that shrouds the outer form of things in order better perceive the hidden mysteries.  New media may be discovered, or pioneering ways of using traditional media.  Ultimately, the discovery can be more universally made that we humans are works of art, that we create both ourselves and the world around us.