“She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.”
– Ellen Burstyn
From 1957 to 1970, the Outer Planet Neptune was travelling through the zodiac sign of Scorpio. This astrological signature claims the era that is known as “The Sixties”, and which was the birth place of the modern “sexual revolution”, the emergence of “youth culture”, and the beginning of the end…… if our grand-parents were to be believed!
We were born listening to the promises of the Uranus Pluto conjunction, and we, the children of The Sixties are destined to uphold the vision of this century, to work towards the radical restructuring that the world needs, because we have the tenacity that is required to endure the struggle for survival, and the collapse of the old order, we were born into the zeitgeist of the moment and we hold the vision in our hearts.
We are a generation of individuals, many of whom are pioneers, reformers and explorers of all worlds, whose remit is to help and guide those who come after us, so that the human race may build new foundations on the ruins of the old.
The Uranus Pluto Conjunction in 1965/66 was in Virgo, the first meeting between these two gods in an earth sign for 2,880 years. It corresponded with the Vietnam War, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the assassinations of J.F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution in China and the student protests that occurred throughout Europe in 1968.
It would seem that mankind might be further along than it actually is, with such potent “seed material” now coming into its power, fifty years on. These “pioneers” these “genius minds of the future” have indeed made a huge impact, but not always in the best of ways. Technology has made giant leaps in the last twenty years especially, but I wonder how much further we might have gone, and how more humanely, if we had not become seduced and disillusioned along the way.
How many of us I wonder, have fallen by the wayside. How many feel that their place in the vision has been lost, because the pain and torment at their plight, and that of planet earth, is so intense, so overwhelming, that they feel helpless in the face of such an enormous task.
For Neptune in Scorpio, the quest for redemption can easily become lost in the lure of addiction. The desire nature is intense and powerful, the yearning for that ultimate communion with the source, so overwhelming that it can be hard to deny. The hunger for transformation and transcendence demands harsh and bitter lessons, for there is a spiritual undertone to this placement that is vital to its true understanding.
This generation, which is watching the death of religion with little arising to fill the void that is left, is being charged with helping the spirituality of mankind to arise from the ashes.
We are being asked to look into the face of our own torment and to discover the tools that are required to “fill the void”, to find our own connection with the source, and to discover meaning and healing in our own, often painful lives.
Society has become empty and meaningless for many, and perversely, as a species, we are becoming more and more divorced from physical human contact, in our almost incessant yearning to connect.
As a generation, we are empowered with a vision of that ultimate unity that we remember, we who were innocents in “The Summer of Love”. On a psychic level we absorbed the zeitgeist of the moment, and seek its expression still, sometimes compulsively, in our need to assuage the desire for contact with the divine.
But what we ultimately seek is not to be found in profound sexual connections or from trying to recapture our experience in the womb. It is not to be found in a bottle or a jar, from a packet, or from the man on the corner, or even in our children.
We are being asked, on a spiritual level, to die and to be reborn, to discover within our own “deaths” our reason for being here, the vision that we came here to realize, the fact that we actually have something important to live for. We are being asked to heal our pain, and to rise from the ashes to help others heal theirs, and to help pave the way into the world we were born to re-create.
Joanna-Kate Grant 