PARADISE POST

Neptune: heavens, covers, heaves, lost paradises

More Neptune! The third in a series. See also here and here. When a slow-moving, elusive outer planet changes signs, it’s a cue to tune into that planet, its moods, time, symbols. Two offerings which are almost full, to mark Neptune’s move:

1. A 4-session exploration of Neptune in your natal chart, transiting Neptune, dreams, art. Read the details and fill out the application here. I’ve been loving these so far.

2. & for those who side eye 4 weeks with Neptune, one-session deep dives during the last week of April:

NEPTUNE: DREAM MACHINE
*discount code for paying subscribers at the very bottom of this

Space is limited, and when the sessions are gone, they’re...gone.

Milton Dictating to His Daughter, Henry Fuseli (1794).

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This month, while thinking about Neptune in sessions with clients, I’ve been slowly rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic told by angels, about angels, the loss of Eden, free will, visions. “Through Neptune,” Liz Greene writes, “we seek fons et origo, Paradise lost and Paradise to be one day regained. In our yearning we also sense our danger…” Neptune’s a deranging, hallucinatory guide, anti-guide to these apparently lost waters. Who or what has promised us Paradise? What are we yearning for? And what, via our impossible longings, our searches for Homes and Heavens, do we make and decimate?

What Freud said about the aim of psychoanalysis. Not a promise of redemption. Not a smooth path to figuring out one’s life situation. Or a recipe for crystal clarity. As in art and dreams: no neat step by step guide. But to relieve us, in bursts, of our “hysterical misery” so that we can find not paradise but “ordinary unhappiness.” Paradise Lost is a tale of our first disobedience. And we go deep into the psychology of Satan, that very famous fallen angel. More on this later, maybe. “The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

Ordinary unhappiness, like lost Paradise, like Neptune, are places in the mind, zones that move and spin like the zodiacal wheel of little animals. “Heav’n!” Heave: to raise up, to lift. Think of the hysterical heaves at the origin of psychoanalysis, the body seeming to convert untold intel, to commune with the above or below—possessed by angels and/or demons and/or reminiscences, made up or real. To throw, to haul, pull. Heave-ho. And heaven: a covering, a vault, home of God, a state of bliss always walled….

Working with Neptune: