Yael R.

Dragwyla First North American rights

Email: Polaris93@aol.com 30,800 words
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NEW MAGICKS FOR A NEW AGE

Volume II: The Magickal Sky
Book 2: The Planets

Þ
Part 9: Neptune, the Mystic
Chapter 1: General Discussion

Until 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh finally verified the existence of Pluto, Neptune was the
outermost of the known members of the Solar System. In fact, due to the extreme irregularity of Pluto’s
orbit, which takes Him inside Neptune’s much more regular path about Sol for some 14 years out of His
248 terrestrial-year long sojourn around the Sun, for nearly a decade and a half out of every twelve
decades, Neptune is indeed the most remote of all the members of Sol’s family. Mysterious and isolated,
invisible to our naked eyes, at an average distance of 4.5 light-hours from Sol, Neptune takes 164.8
terrestrial years to complete His lonely journey around our Father Sol.
As befits His name, Neptune is made up largely of water, a vast warm ocean of it covering a small,
hot, rocky core. The lower regions of this ocean are mixed with rocky material at the core to form a
dense mud, while at its surface it peters off into an atmosphere of bi-atomic hydrogen and helium gas,
with small amounts of methane to give Him His distinctive, gorgeous blue coloring.*

*Nigel Henbest, The Planets (New York: Penguin/Viking, 1992), pp. 159-171.

Neptune is similar to Uranus in many ways, but He isn’t exactly a twin to that odd Planet. His vital
statistics, as compared to Uranus’s, are as follows:

Characteristic Neptune Uranus

Mass 1.02 x 1026 0.87 x 1026
Radius (km) 24,300 25,000
Density (times that of 1.64 1.267
water)
 Heat flow (times Solar 2.5 1.0
input)
Methane (PPM in 30,000 10
stratosphere)
Axial tilt 29° 98°
Rotation (hours) 17.7 (?) 17.2

Neptune’s dipole moment (His magnetic field, as described in terms of a gigantic, imaginary bar
magnet buried deep within the Planet) is tilted almost as much as Uranus’s, and is even more offset from
the center of Neptune’s mass than Uranus’s is from Uranus’s mass. So far, Uranus and Neptune are
unique among all the Planets in the Solar System with respect to the tilt and location of Their dipole
moments.
These two giant Planets seem to resemble each other in another way, one that may be related to the
bizarre characteristics of Their magnetic fields. Terrestrial lightning creates distinctive electrical
outbursts called “whistler waves” that travel along magnetic field lines from one terrestrial hemisphere to
the other. Voyager 2 photographed enormous lightning flashes on the dark side of Jupiter, and recorded
strong whistler waves in association with them. However, Voyager 2 photographed no lighting either at
Uranus or Neptune; and while it did record some possible candidates for whistler waves at Uranus, none
at all were found at Neptune. On Earth, lightning is usually associated with rain and strong wind-shears,
so a lack of it on Uranus and Neptune may indicate that strong updrafts and precipitation do not occur in
Their atmospheres.
Like Uranus, Neptune is blue-green in color. But because He has far more methane in His
atmosphere than Uranus does, by some three orders of magnitude, He is much bluer in color than is
Uranus. Whereas Uranus’s color is like that of the sky on a beautiful, warm, clear, but slightly smoggy
day in Southern California, Neptune’s is like that of a deep, pure lake under a slightly overcast mountain
sky, a darkish blue-gray with hints of green in it.
Also unlike Uranus, Whose surface looks like a sky-blue billiard ball, Neptune’s surface displays
various distinctive features. He is banded, of course, a trait He shares with Uranus and all the other gas-
giants. But unlike Uranus’s “almost spook[il]y bland featurelessness,” 170a Neptune’s surface exhibits
cloud-formations which evolve and replace one another relatively quickly, and move about across that
surface somewhat independently of the motion imparted to His atmosphere by axial rotation. In addition,
His interior seems to be much hotter than Uranus’s; the amount of heat given out by His surface is
comparable to that of Uranus, in spite of His much greater distance from Sol. The reasons for these dif-
ferences still aren’t understood very well, even now, after the Voyager missions; a good deal more data
will be needed before we are truly comfortable with our theories about the nature and evolution of all the
Outer Planets.
Even so, we do have some workable theories. Astronomers now generally agree that the Sun and the
rest of the Solar system formed from a vast, disk-shaped cloud of gas, fine grains of material condensing
out of it as it cooled. Near Sol, where this nebula was still hot, metals, metallic oxides, and siliceous ma-
terials condensed, and grains grew into small rocky bodies which would become the inner, “terrestrial”
Planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. But in the cooler regions of the nebula, far from Sol,
enormous amounts of water, methane, and ammonia vapor condensed into grains of ice. Thus at the
outermost edges of the Solar System, icy materials constituted the bulk of Planet-forming material, and
as a result large Planets formed there. Uranus and Neptune grew from the accretion of countless
planetoids, becoming so large that They drew some of the uncondensed gases of the nebula, consisting
mostly of hydrogen and helium, into Their titanic bulk.
Between the rocky, terrestrial inner worlds and the frigid Outer Planets, two bodies became so large
that almost everything nearby, including vast accumulations of gas, were dragged into Their enormous
bulk by the vast, voracious maws of Their gravity-wells. These became Jupiter and Saturn. Together
these two Planets account for roughly 92% of the Planetary mass of the Solar System. But whereas these
two true gas-giants mass respectively of 97% (Jupiter) and 70% (Saturn) hydrogen and helium, only 10-
20% of the mass of Uranus and Neptune consists of these gases. The latter two Planets evolved as the
result of impacts of bodies containing both ice and rock, such as comets, Moon-sized bodies like Nep-
tune’s satellite Triton, outer-system planetoids similar to Pluto, and ice-earths, and there are not true gas-
giants.
 Deep inside Their cores, Uranus and Neptune contain huge stores of primordial thermal energy. In
Uranus, this heat is trapped within the interior, unable to escape. But it flows out relatively freely from
Neptune, energizing deep convective currents and great winds in the atmosphere, until it escapes to
space.
So these two great Planets are very similar in some respects. They are not, however, identical. The
differences between Them may be the result of events that took place completely by chance relatively
late in Their respective formations. The last large mass to impact Neptune hit head-on, mixing and
heating His interior, resulting in an interior that convects, letting heat leak out. But the last major body
to strike Uranus landed a glancing blow, so that Uranus heeled over more than 90ø on His axis and began
to rotate in a weird sideways, retrograde motion, without mixing His interior. As a result, Uranus
remains a stratified body, and heat doesn’t escape from His interior.
As is typical of giant Planets, Uranus has a great number of Moons. Neptune, however, only has a
few, the largest of which wasn’t even originally His: His Moon Triton is a captured body, snagged by
Neptune’s gravitational talons from elsewhere. Along with mighty Triton, one of the most massive
Moons in the Solar System, Neptune has only seven other satellites, including tiny Nereid.
Triton has a surface-temperature of 38° K (-391° F), and, like Jupiter’s Moon Io, exhibits volcanic
activity in the form of geysers. This Moon, probably the strangest in the Solar System, has a number of
unusual features. It is the only major satellite in the Solar System that orbits in a direction opposite to the
spin of Its host body, which strongly suggests that Triton probably was once a free entity, very much like
Pluto, who was later captured by gigantic Neptune’s enormous gravitational field. It is Triton’s
fascinating geology, however, that most capture’s one’s attention. Triton contains a tremendously
diverse variety of terrain, most of the features of which we cannot yet explain, from dark wind-streaks on
Its South polar cap to large, flooded impact craters, to rolling, lightly-cratered terrain, to region’s that
look for all the world like a cantaloupe’s intricately patterned surface. Finally, unlike any other Moon in
the Solar System, Triton has a thin atmosphere, containing clouds, similar to that of Mars in some ways,
consisting primarily of nitrogen.
Another physical manifestation of the inherent Mystery that is Neptune is exhibited by His rings.
Unlike those of all the other giant Planets, Neptune’s rings are not complete. Instead, they consist of ring
arcs, i.e., unconnected segments. This is complete unlike anything found in the rings of any of the other
giant worlds of the Solar System. The rings of the latter, while in many instances varying widely in
width and density around their circumference, are nevertheless all complete rings. Neptune’s ring-arcs
presently defy explanation. Collisions between their constituent particles should have spread the material
into a uniform ring within little more than a decade, unless a satellite in resonant orbit around Neptune
prevented this. No such Moons were found in the right orbits around Him to account for this. So the
question of why the ring-arcs continue to exist is still a mystery – just one of the many that characterize
the Oceanic Lord of Mystery.171

Because Neptune is associated with Sephirah 2, Chokmah, on the Tree of Life, the text of Genesis on
the second day of Creation is pertinent to an understanding of Him:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, dividing the
waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and thus divided the waters below it from the waters
above it, and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the
second day.
– Genesis 1:6-8

Significantly, physical reality as we know it today (subject to change tomorrow, but then, isn’t
everything?) seems to be founded on dichotomy and mirror-imagery, from the principle of symmetry that
is a mainstay of elementary particle physics to the nature and role of gravity in the cosmos. Without
gravity, there may never have been life at all in the universe. An understanding of why this is so entails
several concepts that fall squarely in Neptune’s domain: negative energy, as counterposed against
positive energy in the form of kinetic energy, potential energy, and matter (which, according to
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, is equivalent to energy, as show by the formula E = mc 2); information,
in the sense not only of raw data, but also of meaningful information, with implications for the existence
of living beings such as ourselves, including information in the sense of software, computer programs
designed by us to carry out processes for our purposes; the Theory of Relativity itself, along with its
discoverer, Albert Einstein, a Pisces; quantum mechanics; and a number of other Neptune-ruled items:

Turning now to the problem of biogenesis, we encounter an odd reversal of

sentiment. We now need to explain, not the origin of material stuff, but the origin of
information. Whereas it is good science to seek a physical process to generate matter,
it is regarded as unscientific in the extreme to entertain a process that generates
information. Information is not something that is supposed to come for free (like
cosmic matter(), but something you have to work for. This is really just the second law
of thermodynamics revisited, because the spontaneous appearance of information in the
universe is undeniable (because it is not in thermodynamic equilibrium). If information
can’t be made it must have been there at the beginning, as part of the initial input. The
conclusion we are led to is that the universe came stocked with information, or negative
entropy, from the word ‘go.’
What do astronomical observations say about the information content of the early
universe? Ere we make a very curious discovery. One of the most compelling pieces
of evidence for the big-bang theory is the existence of a universal background of heat
radiation, which seems to be a sort of afterglow of the universe’s fiery birth. This
radiation has traveled across space more or less undisturbed since shortly after the big
bang. It therefore provides a snapshot of what the universe was like near the beginning.
Satellite measurements have determined that the spectrum of the cosmic heat radiation
corresponds precisely to a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. But thermodynamic
equilibrium is a state of maximum entropy that, via the Shannon connection, implies
minimum information. In fact, it suffices to give just one bit of information (the
temperature) to characterize completely a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, so, if the
cosmic background heat radiation is anything to go by, the universe started out with
almost no information content at all.
We seem to be faced with a disturbing contradiction. The second law forbids the
total information content of the universe from going up as it evolves, yet, from what we
can tell about the early universe, it contained very little information. So where has the
information present in the universe today come from? Another way of expressing the
problem is in terms of entropy. If the universe started out close to thermodynamic
equilibrium, or maximum entropy, how has it reached its present state of
disequilibrium, given that the second law forbids the total entropy to go down?
The answer to this cosmic conundrum . . . comes from a careful study of
gravitation. . . . [Think] of a flask of gas at a uniform temperature. If the gas is left
undisturbed it will do nothing; that is, it will remain in equilibrium. But suppose the
mass of gas is so great (as large as an interstellar cloud, say) that gravitation becomes
important. Then it is no longer true that nothing happens. The system is now unstable.
The gas will start to contract, and clumps of denser material will accumulate here and
there. At the centers of the clumps the contraction will make the gas hot. Temperature
gradients will form and heat will flow. In a real interstellar cloud, stars form. The flow
of heat radiation from one such star – the Sun – is the source of free energy, or negative
entropy, that drives all surface life on Earth through photosynthesis. So, under the
action of gravitation, a gas that is supposed to be in thermodynamic equilibrium at a
uniform temperature and maximum entropy, nevertheless undergoes further changes,
causing heat to flow and the entropy to rise further. Thus gravitationally induced
instability is a source of information.
Evidently gravitation changes the rules of the game in a profound way. A system
in which gravitation makes itself felt cannot be considered to be in a state of true
thermodynamic equilibrium, or maximum entropy, just because it is at a uniform
temperature and density. Appearances deceive us. A uniform cloud of gas still has a
lot of free energy to give up via gravitational processes. Even at a uniform
temperature, the gas is in a low entropy state. When it comes to cosmology, gravitation
is the all-dominant force, so we cannot ignore its thermodynamic effects. This means
we cannot conclude from the existence of a uniform background of heat radiation that
the early universe was in fact in a state of overall thermodynamic equilibrium,
gravitation included.
Just as life seems to go ‘the wrong way’ thermodynamically, so too does
gravitation . . . . A smooth gas grows into something clumpy and complex. Order
appears spontaneously. In information terms, this seems all back to front. A uniform
gas, by its very simplicity, can be described with very little information, whereas a star
cluster or galaxy requires a lot of information to describe it. In some as yet ill-
understood way, a huge amount of information evidently lies secreted in the smooth
gravitational field of a featureless, uniform gas. As the system evolves, the gas comes
out of equilibrium, and information flows from the gravitational field to the matter.
Part of this information ends up in the genomes of organisms, as biological information.
Looking at the universe as a whole, the initially smooth distribution of gas coughed
out at the big bang slowly turned into splodges of hotter and cooler gas, and eventually
arranged itself into shining proto-galaxies surrounded by empty space. The proto-
galaxies in turn formed glowing stars. The expansion of the universe assisted the
escalating thermal contrast: as the universe expanded, its background temperature
dropped, and the hot stars were then able to radiate more vigorously into the cold space.
The upshot of these gravitational processes was that an entropy gap opened up in the
universe, a gap between the actual entropy and the maximum possible entropy. The
flow of starlight is one process that is attempting to close the gap, but in fact all sources
of free energy, including the chemical and thermal energy inside the Earth, can be
attributed to that gap. Thus all life feeds off the entropy gap that gravitation has
created. The ultimate source of biological information and order is gravitation.
Tracing the source of information back to gravitation and the smooth state of the
universe just after the big bang still leaves us with the problem of semantics. How has
meaningful information emerged in the universe? This mystery is closely related to the
origin of complexity, another defining factor of life. Scientists are divided over
whether complexity behaves like matter or information – that is, whether or not the
overall complexity of the universe stays the same. Some researches are convinced that
there are laws of complexity. If such laws exist, they may describe how a simple state
can evolve naturally into a more complex on, perhaps even one containing semantic
information. This process is often called self-complexification or self-
organization . . . . Other scientists argue that complexity cannot be conjured out of
midair; a complex system can only be crated by another system at least as complex.
But gravitational complexity gives pause for thought, because it does indeed emerge
naturally from a simple initial state.
As such a weak force, it is hard to see how gravitation could play a direct role in
biochemical processes. However, suggestions have been made along those lines.
Roger Penrose, an Oxford mathematician and a world expert on gravitation theory, has
speculated that gravity may affect biomolecules through quantum processes.
Mathematical physicists Lee Smolin has also compared the subjects of life and
gravitation in his recent book The Life of the Cosmos. He develops an analogy between
the behavior of ecosystems and spiral galaxies. Drawing inspiration from computer
models of self-organization, Smolin finds close parallels in the process of feedback and
pattern formation in star clusters and biology. He believes that life is part of a ‘nested
hierarchy of self-organized systems that begins with our local ecologies and extends
upwards at least to the galaxy.’
If these ideas of Penrose and Smolin are right . . . they may reveal a connection
between the thermodynamically ‘wrong-way’ qualities that characterize both
gravitational and biological systems. It would follow that the explanation of the origin
of life is deeply linked to the origin of the universe itself.
In this same speculative vein, I should like to offer some ideas of my own. The
concept of information crops up in many different scientific contexts – not just biology
and thermodynamics, but in computation and in other branches of physics too. In
quantum mechanics, for example, the wavelike aspects of matter are described by a
mathematical object known as the wave function, which represents everything that is
known about the system being described; i.e., it represents the information content of
the state. . . . [The] distinctive feature of the wave function is its so-called nonlocality
 – it is spread out across space and describes mysterious linkages between widely
separated particles, linkages that Einstein dubbed ‘spooky action at a distance.’ In
other words, the wave function, and its information content, is a global entity, not a
local quantity like momentum, energy, or electric charge.
In relativity theory, information pops up again, but in a very different, and very
curious, context. It is often said that the theory of relativity forbids anything to travel
faster than light. That is not true. It does permit [hypothetical] particles [called
tachyons] to travel faster than light. What is forbidden by the theory is the transmission
of information faster than light. The problem here is that, if A can signal B at
superluminal speed, it is easy to devise a setup that can send signals into the past and
thereby create classic causality paradoxes. These paradoxes do not result from the
possibility of superluminal propagation as such: faster-than-light noise is no threat to
causality, because it is devoid of information. But faster-than-light signals (i.e.,
information) are deeply paradoxical. For example, imagine that the radio-control
device that opens my garage door were able to transmit its signal into the past by, say,
one day. I could then place the device on a radio-activated bomb, programmed to
explode if it receives a signal from the future. What will happen if I press the button
tomorrow? The bomb should explode today, wrecking the device and preventing me
from activating it tomorrow. But if I don’t activate it tomorrow, the bomb will not
explode. Paradoxes of this sort are very familiar to devotees of science fiction. Now,
in principle, the trigger for the bomb doesn’t have to be a complicated radio signal; it
need only be a single quantum particle from the transmitter, as long as the system is set
up appropriately to respond to it. In other words, if the system is constructed in such a
way that the particle concerned is a signal to explode the bomb. But the particle on its
own is undistinguished – a particle is a particle. It becomes the trigger for a bomb, and
a paradox, if it conveys information from the transmitter to the receiver. That is, the
context in which the particle travels backwards in time produces the problem. And
context is a global concept. The particle cannot on its own betray whether it conveys
information or not; no quality that attaches to it locally (as would, for example, electric
charge) says, ‘I possess information.’
Thus, both quantum mechanics and relativity suggest that information is a global
rather than a local physical quantity. You cannot simply inspect a location in space and
detect information. What you see – a particle, for example – becomes information only
in an appropriate global context. Yet whether or not the particle does represent
information is not a trivial or purely semantic matter. It may have dramatic physical
consequences, as the bomb example graphically demonstrates.
How does all this relate to the origin of life? It suggests that we will not be able to
trace the origin of biological information to the operation of local physical forces and
laws. In particular, the oft-repeated claim that life is written into the laws of physics
cannot be true if those laws are restricted to the normal sort, which describe localized
action and proximate forces. We must seek the origin of biological information in
some sort of global context. That may turn out to be simply the environment in which
biogenesis occurs. On the other hand, it may involve some nonlocal type of physical
law, as yet unrecognized by science, that explicitly entangles the dynamics of
information with the dynamics of matter.
– Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 62-67

Here, at the far side of modern science, lies the bridge to Neptune and His place in the esoteric
universe.
 Chapter 2: Astromythology and Psychospiritual Aspects of Neptune
Mythology

Like His brothers Zeus and Hades, Neptune’s Greek analog was one of the sons of Kronos and Rhea.
When Kronos had been deposed by the revolt of the Olympians, the three brothers shook lots in a helmet
to determine which of Them would receive the rulership of the Heavens, the Sea, and the Underworld,
deciding that the Earth was to be held in common by all. As a result of this lottery, Zeus became King of
the Heavens, like His grandfather, Ouranos, before Him; Hades became Lord of the Underworld and all
its treasures; and Poseidon became Lord of the Sea.
Poseidon was every bit as dignified as Zeus, but unlike His extroverted brother He had a sullen,
belligerent nature. Like His enormous domain, the Sea, when angry He often displayed a terrifyingly
violent rage. During his rages, he often caused catastrophic sea- and earthquakes with His Trident, an
almost inconceivably powerful Weapon very similar in form and function to the Weapon of Shiva, the
Hindu Lunar God of Power and Destruction.*

*A hint of just how powerful comes from the fact that the average earthquake or seaquake unleashes
anywhere from 40 to 200 megatons of energy – from about one to four times more powerful than the
most powerful thermonuclear test on record, the thermonuclear device tested on the Kamchatka pen-
insula on October 29, 1961, and 4,000-20,000 times more powerful than the A-bomb dropped on
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

But He could be gentle, too, taking great delight in the world and its pleasures. Sharing Zeus’s
enthusiasm for amorous dalliance, He often gave His wife Amphitrite almost as much vexation over His
wayward behavior as Zeus did Hera over His own randy adventurousness. Appropriately enough,
therefore, according to one cycle of stories He was the father of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Lust,
Who rose naked in all Her glorious beauty from the foam of the Sea.
When it came time for Poseidon to take a wife, He first courted Thetis the Nereid, for He wanted a
wife Who would be at home in the depths of the Sea. But when Themis the Nymph prophesied that any
son born to Thetis would be greater than His father, Poseidon desisted, and gave His blessing to Her
marriage to a mortal, Peleus. He then approached Amphitrite, another Nereid, Who at first found His
advances repugnant, and fled to the Atlas Mountains to escape Him. But He sent messengers after Her,
and one of them, Delphinus, pleaded Poseidon’s case to Her so well that She finally agreed to marry
Him. Out of gratitude, he placed Delphinus among the Stars as a Constellation, the Dolphin.
Amphitrite bore Him three children: Triton, Rhode, and Benthesikyme. She was a good wife to
Him, but even so, as previously mentioned, He drove Her to distraction with His pursuits of other
females. Above all, She hated His infatuation with Skylla, daughter of Phorkys, Lord of Death, Whom
She changed into a barking monster with six heads and twelve feet by throwing a Magickal potion in
Skylla’s bathing-pool.*

*Skylla = Scylla, a dangerous rock on the Italian side of the Straits of Messina, opposite the whirlpool
Charybdis, likewise personified mythologically as a ravenous monster. Navigating these straits is an
extremely dangerous business even for powered boats, because the margin of error between avoiding
being wrecked on Scylla and falling into Charybdis and being sucked down to a watery doom is
extremely small. The saying “between Scylla and Charybdis” means being between two perils,
neither of which can be evaded without risking running afoul of the other. This myth of Skylla’s
transformation into a terrible monster by Amphitrite is obviously an origin story that came into exist-
ence as a way of explaining how the terrible strait came into existence, and why and how the good
Gods had created and maintained it in existence.

Poseidon had a keen eye for beauty and elegance. In the great stables adjoining His underwater
palace off Aegae in Euboea, He kept glorious white chariot-horses with brazen hooves and golden manes,
and a golden chariot. Whenever He went out riding in His chariot, ocean storms instantly ceased, the Sea
became calm, and sea-monsters rose to the surface of the water to frisk about His chariot.
Among the Greek myths is a fascinating just-so story about Poseidon concerning the way in which
the women of ancient Greece lost their political suffrage. It seems that Poseidon was greedy for control
of Earthly kingdoms and wealth, and, as a result of that Greed, he once claimed possession of Attica by
thrusting His great Trident into the Acropolis at Athens, where a well-spring of sea-water immediately
gushed out, which still existed long after, during Classical times, the sound of the surf coming up out of
the depths of the well from far below whenever the South Wind blew. Later, during the reign of
Kekrops, Pallas Athena, the daughter of Zeus, came and took possession of the well, but by a far subtler
means: She planted the first olive-tree beside it. Poseidon, furious, challenged Her to single combat;
Athena would have accepted, but Her father intervened, and ordered Them to submit Their dispute to
arbitration. They therefore appeared before a divine court, consisting of Their fellow deities, Who called
on Kekrops to give evidence. Zeus, as Lord of the Court, of course remained neutral; but while all the
other male deities supported Poseidon, all the Goddesses voted for Athena. As it happened, there was
exactly one more Goddess than there were Gods casting votes on the matter. Thus by a majority of one,
the court found for Athena, giving Her title to Attica, because She had given the land the better gift.
Poseidon, a notoriously poor loser, sent enormous waves to flood the Thrisian Plain, where Athena’s
city of Athenae stood. She fled to the city that would become Athens and took up residence there,
likewise naming it after Herself. So, to appease Poseidon’s wrath, so that he would not destroy Athens as
well, the women of Athens were deprived of their vote, and the men were forbidden to bear their
mother’s names in the way they had done prior to that time.
In this story Poseidon probably represents the ancient island kingdoms of the Aegean Sea and those
regions of the Mediterranean Sea close to it. These island kingdoms were wealthy and powerful, and the
early land-based cultures of the Attic Peninsula, the land we now call Greece, could not have afforded to
antagonize the sea-kingdoms too far. It is likely that somewhere far back in the history of that region, in
order to pacify and retain an alliance with a powerful patriarchal island-nation ally, one or more of the
proto-Hellenic Attic peoples repudiated the Great Goddess and shifted the psychospiritual focus of their
culture from a matrifocal to a patriarchal one.
Another possibility is that “Poseidon” in this story refers to pirate bands of the Aegean and
Mediterranean Seas, consisting primarily of men, with a few captured women or dispirited female camp-
followers aboard their ships, whose land-raids forced the land-based proto-Hellenic Attic peoples to adopt
a more and more patriarchal, militaristic cultural set, with the fortress mentality and sharp division of
roles between men and women into male/warriors vs. female/breeders characteristic of
patriarchomilitarism, because of the edge on survival which such a sociocultural shift would have given
them in such a situation.
In any case, it is certain that this story reflects real, historical events, however distorted their
transmission down the ages via the medium of this story may be. Stories such as this are clues
concerning the probable beginnings of patriarchal tyranny among Attic peoples, ones which the astute
historian or anthropologist can’t afford to overlook.
The mythology of Poseidon overlaps and commingles with that of Zeus in confusing ways, probably
reflecting the historical process of cultural borrowing and accretion that occurred as different cultures
entered Attica, sometimes living peacefully side-by-side or even intermarrying with older ones in the
region, sometimes absorbing earlier Attic cultures more violently, via conquest and pillage. In this case,
island and land-based cultures must have interacted considerably over the centuries in many ways,
sometimes through relatively peaceful mercantile exchanges, sometimes through piracy or imperialistic
conquest. In the latter case, it is quite possible that this season’s pirates could be next season’s conquered
people; the victims of rapine and piracy may not always have been all that innocent of such crimes
themselves.
When, at the end of this process, sometime at the beginning of Greece’s Classical period, Zeus had
become the unquestioned ruler of the entire pantheon of Greece’s many Gods, and Poseidon was firmly
established in the Greek religion as Lord of the Sea, the various cultures of land and sea which They had
respectively represented over the previous centuries had so thoroughly and inextricably intermingled that
the boundary between the mythologies of these two Gods had consequently become quite blurry, losing
much of its definition along the way as a result of this process.
Thus many of the things ascribed to Zeus are also associated with Poseidon, but in different story-
cycles. For example, according to one set of stories, the creation of the horse is ascribed to Poseidon.
This may reflect a series of historical events by which horses were first brought to the Attic peninsula
from outside, perhaps from Scythia, on board merchant-vessels belonging to the island-peoples referred
to collectively in these stories as “Poseidon.” But another story-cycle, probably a much later one, taught
that Zeus Himself had created the horse and gave it as a gift to mankind, as He had all other great good
things, and that Poseidon only falsely claimed to have done so Himself in one of His many fits of brag-
ging. In any case, however, horses were clearly sacred to Poseidon, and even today Western astrology
reflects this by assigning the rulership of horses and other large animals to Pisces, the Sign of the Sea,
whose Lord is Neptune.
Also, as previously mentioned, in one set of stories Poseidon was said to have been Aphrodite’s
father; in others, it was said that Zeus begot Her on Dione, Who is variously said to have been either the
daughter of Oceanos and Tethys the sea-nymph or the child of Air and Earth. In still another cycle,
which confuses Poseidon with Ouranos, it was said that the Goddess was born of the bloody foam which
gathered about the severed genitals of the murdered Ouranos when His son Kronos threw them into the
sea.*

*At times, this sort of mythological ambiguity tends to drive modern minds such as ours to distraction.
We like things to be “cut and dried, on the square, straight and level.” As a result, we tend to reject
anything that can’t be easily pinned down and dissected and its parts clearly identified and labeled.
But it would be a grave mistake to decide that only one of these stories is the “true” one and the rest
somehow “false” or “mistaken.” Because the Greeks, like the Jews and the Hindus, cherished origin-
story cycles from more than one era of their history, rather than keeping just the one they liked the
best, suppressing all the rest, it is possible to trace the evolution of their culture over many centuries
from its ancient beginnings in the intermingling of many different early settlers in and around Attica
to the Classical period.
Sigmund Freud, for all his faults, wisely regarded the development of the psyche of the growing
human child as a reproduction in microcosm of this same process. From his broad, extensive
Classical education as well as his researches, he concluded that by looking carefully at all the
different visions, dreams, ideas, and other phenomena of mind thrown up by the psyche not as a self-
contradictory, nonsensical hash but rather as psychoarcheological evidence of the history of the
person in whom that psyche has developed, a beautifully detailed, highly accurate portrait of that
person’s life up to the time of such a psychoanalysis could be obtained.
And, just as it is true on the historical and psychodynamic planes, this principle also holds good
on the psychospiritual ones. The story of the birth of Aphrodite is a case in point.
Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, is the nocturnal esoteric ruler of Aquarius, whose
diurnal esoteric Lord is Juno (Hera), whose mundane Lords are Saturn (Kronos) and Uranus
(Ouranos), and in which Jupiter (Zeus) and Neptune are exalted. Further, Venus is diurnally exalted
in Pisces, which is mundanely ruled by Jupiter and Neptune. Thus all four of these Planets clearly
have Aquarian aspects, and as a result tend to blend well in Their interactions. The plurality of
stories concerning the birth of Venus and the mythological ambiguity surrounding it reflect the fact
of the astrological harmony of function among these four divinities; for this reason alone, it would
be a mistake to gloss it over by junking all but one of these stories as being somehow less “true” than
the others.
The ambiguity inherent in historical, psychodynamic, and psychospiritual reality is also
exhibited on the purely physical level. Apparently “solid” matter, such as electrons, can be
diffracted just like a beam of light. Not only is this true of a stream of electrons, which would be
understandable in terms of the wave properties of the stream itself, but it holds true for individual
electrons, as well. Electrons and other leptons, while clearly material in their own right, are so small
that they are right at the boundaries of “solid” matter, and consequently behave in ways that do not
always conform to what we normally expect of matter. Quantum mechanics reveals that the physical
world can be exceedingly fuzzy and ambiguous, and that the appearance of solid boundaries and
clear-cut divisions between things that is supposedly the hallmark of the “real world” is ultimately
only that: an appearance, and little more. If ostensibly objective physical reality has its fuzzy
aspects, then it’s a lead-pipe cinch that the far more subtle, slippery psychosocial, psychospiritual,
and Magickal universes of the Inner Planes frequently exhibits fuzziness in extremis. The ambiguity
characteristic of Greek and Hindu mythology and the Pentateuch is just a psychohistorical expression
of the fuzziness inherent in the nature of things – a phenomenon which, by the way, is one of the
matters ruled by Neptune, Whose keywords include Ambiguity and Ambivalence.
 According to Robert Graves, Poseidon’s “children” may have had Their origin in the three aspects of
the Moon-Goddess, and there are other hints of Lunar mythology in Poseidon’s story-cycles. This may
reflect the fact that Luna and Neptune are both strong in the Signs Cancer and Pisces, and that Luna is
also a sort of lower octave of Neptune. 171a
As we shall see, all these stories and myth-cycles reflect the astrological and Magickal influence and
powers of Neptune, Whose Keywords include the following: Ambiguity, Ambivalence,
Impressionability, Nebulousness, Deception, Dissolution, Diffusion, Entropy, Fog, Mist, Fusion,
Transcendence, Intoxication, Interpenetration, Concealment, and the Occult. The problem which
Neptune poses is: How can a fish know water? Neptune’s native solves the problem either by a) vision*,
i.e., climb out of the water and look at what’s there, as we did early on in life’s long history; or b) by
induction, sensing the resistance of the medium as one moves through it and concluding from it
something about the nature of that medium.

*The Mystical Vision Trance, in which one carries out a psychospiritual exploration of the Inner Planes.
 The Esoteric Nature and Influence of Neptune

Even with the data received from Voyager 2’s fly-by of Neptune, a great deal concerning Neptune’s
physical make-up still remains conjecture only. This reflects His nature as the Planet of Mystery.
Uranus rules the bizarre and unusual, but His nature is to Enlighten by presenting us with them, to cause
scientific and technological breakthroughs as spin-offs of unexpected emergent results of scientific
experiments, and to introduce “strange” thoughts into our minds which ultimately initiate whole new
philosophies and new ways of looking at things which revolutionize our lives. But the Understanding
which Uranus brings can ultimately be tested against objective reality, and understood in objective terms
and with respect to linear logic. This isn’t true of Neptune.
Neptune brings us experiences whose logic is either multilinear or alinear, like the logic of
psychodynamic and psychospiritual reality, or the geometry of the Mandelbröt Set. Uranus rules the
Timeless, the Eternal, those things which can only be understood in a manner that doesn’t depend on
time-like processes; Neptune rules the Infinite, and the second dimension of Time, choice, by the repeat-
ed exercise of which we slowly grow into the Wisdom that is Neptune’s apotheosis. The concept of
alternate worlds, generated by the selection of different options at choice-nexi, is a Neptunian one.
Uranus teaches us how to transcend our limitations, cross Da’ath’s Abyss of Night, by shattering the
old boundaries of explored or consensus, “permissible” reality in a way which nevertheless does not
violate principles of natural law. For this reason, Uranus rules birds, because long ago birds learned to
transcend the limits set by gravity on their physical being by growing feathers, elongating their forefeet
into wings, and taking to the air. Just so, we achieve Binah, Understanding and Enlightenment, by
transcending the mistake of thinking of ourselves as inert stones (Saturn, and the seven Sephiroth below
the Abyss) that must be winched, thrown, or otherwise transported across the Abyss by some agency out-
side ourselves, coming to Understand that we are instead creatures of Spirit, spreading the wings of Spirit
and flying under our own power across the Abyss into the Garden of the Supernals.
Neptune, on the other hand, teaches us the nature of those limits themselves. In some cases, He dis-
solves those limits away in an incomprehensible flood of inassimilable experiences, leaving us to
flounder in the mud, so that we learn that limits, in the form of structure and order, can be of supreme
value. In others, He instructs us in how to do without limits, to leave behind the circumstances in which
the old limits were relevant and take up new ones entirely, just as the whales, big and small, gave up a
life on land bound by gravity, restricted to two dimensions, and adapted themselves to life in the ocean,
with its gravity-canceling buoyancy and its three-dimensional niches to which a consideration of gravity
is irrelevant. Whereas Uranus gives us Understanding and the knowledge necessary to it, Neptune gives
us Wisdom, born out of experience as Venus was born of the foam of Ocean: the Wisdom to accept our
limits, when we must – or to take up a mode of life in which the previous limits do not, cannot apply at
all.* Uranus rules that moment of life when the umbilicus that joins mother and new-born child is cut
and the neonate becomes a truly air-breathing organism for the first time; Neptune, a higher octave of
Luna as well as of Venus, rules the entire nine months of life prior to that and the environment of the
womb, during which the fetus is an aquatic animal, living in the womb’s tiny sea, free of gravity, its
existence one of timeless dream and completely accepting sensitivity to every sensation, sound, and sub-
stance that comes to it through the flesh of its mother’s abdomen or the placenta and umbilical cord.

*Neptune is also the ruler of alcoholism and indeed of all addictions. From Alcoholics Anonymous
comes this prayer, which sums up this idea precisely:

Oh, Lord,
Teach us to change the things
That we can change,
To accept the things
We cannot change,
And to understand
The difference between them.

Uranus rules applied mathematics and science, objectively acquired, hard knowledge, engineering
and crafts, and the knowledge inherent in these; Neptune rules the theoretical disciplines, and all abstract
concerns. Uranus rules the exotic, attractive to us because it excites our curiosity; Neptune rules beauty,
as well as the elegance of a beautiful formal proof and the fitness, the rightness of a theory which we find
attractive initially for no other reason that the fact that it seems so right. Saturn rules pragmatic Truth,
Uranus rules Enlightenment and scientific, objectively verifiable Truth; but Neptune rules all those
forms of Truth, such as Beauty, or any other perception ultimately dependent upon our instinctive,
subjective gut reaction to the world, which does not depend upon linear logic or objective evidence for
their attractiveness and acceptance.
Uranus rules the great mass of the atmosphere which, tugged about by the tidal pull of Luna and Sol,
pushed inexorably Westward by Coriolis forces, weighs down upon the heavily folded and wrinkled
surface of the Earth, dragging across it, snagged by that surface and rebounding against it as it rolls
onward toward the Sunset and the Western Gates of Death, adds mega-erg upon remorseless mega-erg to
the strain of Earth’s crust against itself until that energy is suddenly released, all at once, in catastrophic
earthquakes. Uranus is Pure Form, the essence of Form, the potential of Form, its purest abstract, like
those great currents, such as the Jet Stream, that structure our atmosphere; He brings new form into man-
ifest being by shattering the older forms that stand in His way.
Neptune, on the other hand, is Lord of Ocean. He is the Lord of Water, of all that dwells in the
Earth’s waters, and of Water’s manifold forms, aspects, and manifestations, as well as of all the treasures
and the secrets hidden in its mysterious depths. He accommodates Himself to all things, taking His form
entirely from His container, His content from all that His environment brings to Him, absolutely passive
and receptive – yet He is the Universal Solvent, dissolving all that is placed in Him, at last. By letting
gravity do all the work for Him, He always gets where He wants to go. Incompressible, when manifest as
the turgor of a humble weed, He can shatter the strongest concrete like a saltine cracker to make a
passage for that plant to reach the Sun’s light and warmth, insinuating Himself upward via the tendrils of
the growing plant into every tiniest nook and cranny of the barrier between Himself and Apollo, riddling
it with Himself until, crazed and disintegrated throughout by the ever-growing network of His Will, that
barrier falls away in defeat. Pure Force, He is the Universal Solvent, the most volatile of all compounds,
and the subtlest.
Neptune rules the process by which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, which involves the complete
disassembly, at a molecular level, of the caterpillar and the re-assembly of the resultant mess into a
butterfly. The chemical constituents of the caterpillar provide both the fuel and the structural material
necessary for the latter.
The wisest of all substances, the subtlest of the Elements, it was Water which, taking experience
from all the world around it, drew about itself a skin of Van der Waäls forces, manifested Will, and
began to move about the world under its own power and initiative. We are all nothing but water tied up
in bags of electromagnetic forces, with a few odd trace materials thrown in for flavor. The essence and
substance of Life and Will is Water, the primordial material and the sine qua non of Life. 172 It is for this
reason that Neptune is associated with Chokmah, the Father, Whose Element is Fire, including the Fires
of Spirit, rather than with Binah, the Mother, primordial Water. It is only in Water that Spirit and Will
manifest themselves on the physical planes, and while the substance of Water, the compound oxygen
dihydride, is Watery, its essence is Fire and the Spirit, the Intentionality and Purpose that is the hallmark
of all biological phenomena, ourselves included.
Neptune dissolves, but also resolves and re-integrates. Neptune shares the Lordship of Alchemy with
Pluto; while Pluto rules the transmutative aspects of Alchemy, Neptune rules the biochemistry and
biophysics of water, the fundamental basis of all Earthly life.* Water, the Universal Solvent, is also a
fundamental tool of the Alchemist, so much so that Neptune shares that Art’s Lordship with His brother
Pluto.

*”Life is basically characterized as water with a few trace contaminants” – Larry Niven, paraphrased
from his “Becalmed in Hell,” in Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1975).

In Einstein’s equation E = mc 2, Uranus/Binah is “mc 2,” pure Form, while Neptune is “E,” Fire,
purest Force, energy in its purest manifestation. Water, the Universal Solvent, is virtually formless,
filling any volume into which it is put up to a level dictated by the presence and strength of any nearby
gravitational fields (ruled by Saturn) as well as its own inherent volume, taking on the shape of any
surface upon which it lies. Itself formless, it dissolves all things, and is thus pure Force.
 On the other hand, however, in Einstein’s paradox of the Immovable Object versus the Irresistible
Force, Saturn may be said to represent the first and Uranus the second, while Neptune resolves the
paradox itself via Piscean integration and synthesis to create a larger framework that can accommodate
both conflicting elements (Daleth, the Path connecting Binah/Uranus to Chokmah/Neptune, represents
the reconciliation of those elements within the resolution represented by Chokmah/Neptune). Here, the
pure Force that is Neptune forces the entire matrix of things to change to accommodate what would
otherwise be in irreconcilable paradox. For this reason, Neptune is the higher octave of Venus, Who
rules diplomacy and accommodation. But whereas Venus brings about accommodation by causing
harmony or reconciliation between the individual elements that are in conflict, Neptune creates it by
changing the underlying structure of the universe in which the conflict is manifest, so that it is eliminated
by modification or elimination of the principles of that universe that gave rise to it in the first place, as in
Einstein’s resolution of the apparently paradoxical results of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887
e.v. via his Special and General Theories of Relativity.
Neptune rules Sephirah 2, Chokmah, the Sphere of the Starry Heavens or Zodiac, because Neptune
rules higher mathematics, modern physics, computer science, and photography, all of which are
necessary to observe and make sense of our modern Cosmos. Whereas Uranus rules computer hardware,
Neptune rules software, and the mathematical reasoning upon which it is based. Uranus rules the pure
forms of higher mathematics, and the principles upon which modern technology and science are based;
Neptune rules the essential processes of the discovery and the proving out of the structures studied in
higher mathematics and the principles of modern objective, pragmatic arts and sciences, the very energy
of that process.
Neptune, the Crown of the Pillar of Mercy of the Tree of Life, and the higher octave of Venus, is the
apotheosis of emotion or feeling, hence is hot, as the emotions – ruled by Venus – are Fiery in nature.
Likewise the physical Planet Neptune is unexpectedly hot, much more so than frigid Uranus, Who is
much nearer the Sun. Uranus, Crown of the Pillar of Severity and higher octave of Mercury, is cold, as
Mercury, and logic, reason, and intellect, ruled by Him, are cold. Neptune rules fantasy, Uranus rules
science-fiction – respectively the Yang and Yin of cutting-edge literature (which is conceived above the
Abyss, appreciated only by the Enlightened).* *

*Pluto, Crown of the Middle Pillar as well as of the Tree of Life as a whole, rules the literature of horror,
which is the union of science-fiction (ruled by Uranus) and fantasy (ruled by Neptune). The Planet
Mercury, the lower octave of Uranus, is cooler than Venus, the lower octave of Neptune, even
though Venus is farther from the Sun than Mercury is – the same relationship that holds true for the
physical avatars of Their higher octaves. Will the Planet Pluto be found to be a mosaic of hot and
cold, physically speaking?) [Noted August 4, 1993, at 10:31 p.m. PDT, Seattle, WA.]

Neptune, His Sign Pisces, and the Twelfth House traditionally rule prisons and hospitals. These are
absolutely artificial little worlds in miniature. Because of the malignity of the issues with which they
deal – crime, illness, insanity, possession, death – such institutions are thus manifestations of Qlippoth of
the true, healthy expressions of this Planet, Sign, and House. Thus artificial, sealed, more or less self-
sustaining habitats of all kinds are under the dominion of Neptune and His Sign and House, including,
e.g., space-habitats, submarines, sealed terrestrial environments, installations on airless worlds or those
with unbreathable atmospheres, etc. By extension, in the human realm, Neptune, along with His Sign
and House, also rules artifice and artificial creations of all kinds, hence Homo faber – Man the Maker –
himself. Beyond the realm of the strictly human, He rules sealed environments, self-sustaining systems,
and habitats maintained by the deliberate effort of living beings of all kinds – and thus He rules Gaia, our
living world, Whose eco-physiological systems (to paraphrase Lovelock’s lovely term, “planetary
physiology”), from the atmosphere to tectonic plates and the whole cycle of materials from the Earth’s
core and mantle to the continents and back again, are all the products and result of the activities of
Earth’s life over the approximately 3.5 billion years of its existence.* Uranus, Aquarius, and the
Eleventh House rule the technology necessary to sustain such habitats, from the chloroplasts invented by
Earth’s first green plants, by which Earth’s botanical life has created and maintained our oxygenated
atmosphere ever since, to the high-energy, cyberneticized technology necessary to build and maintain a
complete space-station or Lunar habitat, its complement of staff-members and visitors included. But the
habitats themselves, miniature, artificial universes created and sustained only because of the deliberate,
willed activities of living things, are holons ruled by Neptune, Pisces, and the Twelfth House, which rule
holons of all types, as well as such holistic processes as synthesis, such arts and technologies as holo-
graphy, and such phenomena as holographs. Pluto, Scorpio, and the Eighth House, on the other hand,
rule the matrices in which such habitats are embedded, from the rock and soil of artificial terrestrial
biospheres built and staffed by human beings to the oceans in which nuclear submarines cruise to raw
space itself, the Body of Our Lady Nuit, the home of space-stations and interplanetary and interstellar
vessels. (In the case of submarines and other artificial marine habitats, Pluto is represented in His Avatar
of Ta’aroa, Polynesian God of Hell, the Wild Storm, and the Oceanic Abysses.)

*It is interesting, in this context, that Earth is often referred to by those in the biological, ecological, and
astronomical sciences as “the water world.” Earthly life is basically intelligent water, water which,
by acquiring some solid and gaseous materials kept in suspension within itself, enabled itself to
move around on its own and fill every conceivable niche, including that of motile, land-dwelling
animals such as ourselves. Gaia Herself, Earth’s biosphere, is this same theme of “life = water” writ
large, on a medium covering an entire Planet. Neptune is the Lord of Water. Since Gaia and Earth’s
life are water, water which learned how to take charge of its own destiny, take on shape and form,
move around on its own, and act to fulfill its own Will by its own actions, Neptune naturally would
seem to be Lord of Gaia and of Earthly life as well, anyway. The fact that Neptune is Lord of
deliberately created habitats, and that Gaia is such a habitat, built and maintained by Earth’s life over
some 3.5 billion years, according to the model developed by Lovelock, Margules, et al., leads to this
same conclusion, but from a different direction. That both lines of reasoning lead to the same
conclusion strongly suggests that astrologically and Magickally speaking, Neptune can be considered
to be a major influence over Earthly life, on the biological planes, and over Gaia, Earth’s biosphere,
at least on ecological and planetological ones.

Finally, whereas Saturn rules the Superego, and Uranus rebellion against or freedom from it,
Neptune rules Conscience, that is, awareness of the needs of self-in-community, the Greater Self. The
Superego is born out of fear – fear some ultimate authority, especially authoritarian caregivers or anyone
else with ultimate power over one’s being and destiny during one’s earliest stages of life. Such fear is in
the domain of Saturn; rebellion against it is in that of Uranus. The conscience, on the other hand, is born
out of love, out of identification with someone who is greatly loved, usually the nurturing parent of one’s
infancy: one learns, via such a relationship of love, to empathize with others, and feel compassion for
them as a result. Conscience is the perception of one’s greater self as embodied in other individuals,
one’s community, even humanity in general, and those who act on the basis of their conscience are
motivated to do so by the drive to nurture and protect their greater self as manifest in others even at great
risk to themselves. Neptune, the Lord of Selfless Love, is thus the ruler of conscience and the acts of
compassion motivated by it. For example, during the Hitlerian era in Germany, many “pure Aryan”
Germans who stood to lose a great deal by it if caught, helped rescue Jews from certain death, helping
them to escape Germany or German-occupied countries, even hiding them in their own homes, at risk of
certain death should they be found out. Most of these were ordinary people, not saints, with the failings
common to us all. Yet they went out of their way to help people they didn’t know, perhaps didn’t even
like (some of the rescuers were in fact professed anti-Semites!), at great risk of life and everything they
held dear, for no other discernible reason than conscience. So these rescuers were impelled by the drive
to protect and cherish their greater selves, the perception of which is ruled by Neptune, as manifested by
the objects of their rescue attempts, the Jews, Gypsies, and other “ethnic undesirables” whom they
helped, or at least tried, to save.*

*See Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York:
Anchor/Doubleday Books, 1994), passim. On page 3 thereof is a catalog of a few of some of the
people who helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust, in spite of their all-too human failings.

More broadly speaking, Neptune rules Agape, love that is not dependent upon ethnic background,
gender, presence or lack of a sexual bond, genetic kinship, or even species. People keep pets not only as
child-surrogates, but also, if only unconsciously, in order to re-establish and strengthen their bonds to the
greater community of all life, Gaia, Mother Earth. Thus in a manner of speaking, pets are also parent-
surrogates. In fact, this is literally true in the case of many cats, who attempt countless times to get their
humans interested in the mice and other small game they catch and bring to them. Rather than trying to
placate powerful parent-figures with “presents,” they are trying to teach their beloved but backward
“kittens” how to hunt and otherwise support themselves in life. That this is so can be confirmed by what
happens when, instead of rejecting these “gifts” with loud protest, their human “children” act pleased and
“accept” these gifts with apparent great praise and delight (ditching them later only out of sight and
sound of the cat who brings these to them, of course): subsequently the cat will start performing all sorts
of stalk-pounce-and-kill activities, using everything from catnip mice or other toys to dead leaves to
Little Friskies kibble-bits, whatever’s handy, in front of their human people at every opportunity. In
other words, since these huge, awkward kittens at last seem to have gotten the idea that live game is
interesting, the next step in the educational process clearly is to teach them how to run it down and kill
it . . . (Isn’t maternal love wonderful in its never-failing optimism and faith?) Ultimately, Neptune rules
the sort of love that impels others to lay down their lives and risk all they have for others, including non-
human others. It inspires the Animal Rescue activists who break into animal-testing laboratories to
rescue animals, at risk of heavy fines and long imprisonment if caught; the Earth First activists who put
“all they are and all they have” on the line for a forest, a lake, a meadow, Mother Earth Herself; anyone
who extends a hand to others in peril, in need of rescue or comfort, regardless of pragmatic and personal
considerations.
But while Neptune rules the highest expressions of love, He also rules the most extreme of love’s
betrayals, as well as any abuse of trust and love for selfish ends. He rules deception, betrayal, and the
violation and defilement of love and trust as a source of perverse pleasure. The following section deals
with these and other Qlipphotic expressions of the influence and power of Neptune.
 The Qlipphotic aspects of Neptune: Abuses of Subtle Power, and Subtle Abuses of Power

The four Outer Planets, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, are Lords of Elemental Power, of the
primordial ultimate forces and principles upon which all existence is based, and their uses and abuses. Of
these, Neptune and Pluto are the strongest and most profoundly important.
Pluto rules the spirit and the Will, whose physical locus includes the most of the hind-brain and
brain-stem. Neptune rules the soul, whose physical throne comprises the pineal gland, the hypothalamus
(the throne of appetite and desire, the Lordship of which He shares with Pluto), the corpus callosum
(bridge between left and right hemispheres, the Integrator and Synthesist), and the corpus coerleus (the
seat of vision and dream so often triggered during deep sleep by Plutonian surges through the brain-stem
containing it, producing night-terrors). These two Planets together therefore rule black Magick and
sorcery, abuses of power over others, Pluto ruling enslavement of the Will and destruction of the spirit of
others for political reasons, personal gain, or sheer pleasure, Neptune ruling enslavement or destruction
of the souls of others for whatever end.
Neptune, as Lord of Water, rules memory. Memory has three aspects: ancestral and cultural
memory, ruled by Cancer, in which Neptune is nocturnally exalted; biological or genetic memory, going
back to the dawn of Life on Earth, ruled by Scorpio, of which Neptune is diurnal esoteric Lord; and past-
life memories of the soul’s journey from lifetime to lifetime, impelled by the Plutonian Fire of Will, the
vast oceanic reservoirs of the personal and collective unconscious ruled by Pisces, of which Neptune is
diurnal mundane Lord. Neptune rules the uses and abuses of power over all these, and over the emotions,
the active principle of the soul. He thus rules psychiatry, a profession in which the physician’s oath is
honored more in the breach than otherwise. It was Thomas Szasz, the anti-establishment psychiatrist,
who said,

I would far, far rather be charged with murder than insanity. I can always defend
myself against a charge of murder.

Psychiatry is a weird, amphibious profession that is half medical, half legal in nature, tending
strongly to partake of the virtues of neither and the worst sins of both. Frequently used by individuals as
well as societies as a form of verbal prestidigitation to evade justice rather than achieve it, psychiatry is
notorious for its use in suppression of political dissent in the former Soviet Union, the United States of
America, and elsewhere. It has also been used to help destroy the credibility of potential witnesses to
serious crimes, to railroad people into mental hospitals and rob them of their rights under the law and
their property and goods in a legally sanctioned way, to ensorcel the minds of individuals and whole
populations into disbelieving their own minds and memories or purchasing and using things they don’t
need, or which might actually be harmful to them, or endorsing political candidates who have absolutely
no merit whatsoever for the elected office for which they are running.
Among other forms of Neptunian sorcery, the psychiatrization of society has helped to facilitate the
suppression of the fact of endemic, aggravated abuses of women, children, and other disenfranchised
victim-classes in stratified urban societies by those in power over them, or, when suppression of such
crimes isn’t possible, to turn the blame for the results of such chronic abuse on its victims, themselves,
e.g., blaming egregious psychoneuroses and psychoses that are the results of years and years of
systematic, chronic physical and emotional assaults, psychospiritual violation, and terrorization endured
by helpless children, women, employees, etc. on “fantasies” entertained by the “perverted” victims rather
than on the chronic, egregious abuse they have suffered. Here, clearly, Neptunian evils are inextricably
intermixed with Plutonian ones, since psychiatry in such cases works to control, subvert, and harness both
the memories (Neptune) and the wills (Pluto) of others in the service of maintenance of the status quo.
Where Pluto commits crimes of any kind, especially murder and the enslavement of the Wills of others
for ends not their own, Neptune rules the evil conjurer who uses the skills of social and verbal
prestidigitation to perpetuate and conceal such crimes.
The psychiatric medicalization of morality and jurisprudence is used to confine the innocent without
regard to their rights. Victims of crime are labeled as “sick” when they try to reach out for aid and
comfort or to report what has happened to them – so that society forgets all about the possibility that the
crimes were real, or bringing perpetrators to book, in the ensuing psycho-legal uproar. Crime and evil
become trivialized and are reflected back upon the victims, rather than investigated and justly dealt with.
Perjury comes to be called “denial.” Gratuitous violence and utter disregard for the rights of others is
labeled “acting out.” And while in some cases it may be truly appropriate to refer to exceedingly danger-
ously violent individuals as “psychotic,” “sociopathic,” or by other psychiatric labels, because their
egregiously violent behavior is driven by factors beyond their control, the psychiatrization of justice goes
even farther, putting these felons into “hospitals,” from which they are all too often released as “cured”
after a very short time – going forth to commit further crimes of predatory violence.
Other Qlippothic expressions of Neptune include, e.g., iatrogenic diseases such as virulent
staphylococcus and other antibiotic-resistant infections, which evolved in hospitals (ruled by Neptune);
water-pollution (Neptune rules Water, is a Lord of toxins, and is a co-ruler of discard and waste); covert
crime of any kind; addictions which, such as addictions to illegal substances, must be hidden from
society; etc.
In Magickal explorations of the Tunnels of Set, evocations of Malkunofat, the Qlippothic spirit of
Key 23, Mem, Neptune’s Path could be profitably beefed up with material taken from, e.g., a hospital of
any kind, a room where a crime was perpetrated and covered up, a mental hospital used to confine people
who are not insane for criminal goals, a drug-addict’s works, etc.

The Last Word: Aleister Crowley on Neptune

Neptune is the Chalice, filled with pure water or fine wine, placed at the North side of the Altar. The
Chalice is the Soul of all Life, creative and responsive, which must be completely open, empty of
distractions, and receptive in order to allow the God to enter into and inform the Deep Mind, the True
Self, with Its power. The Lesson of the Chalice is the willing Dissolution in the Waters of Creation of the
Ego, the daylight mind, and mundane self through Magickal ritual, thereby making oneself available to
the Gods as a perfect Instrument and Weapon of Their Will, for whatever purposes They wish. It is the
Chalice that makes possible the gift of the Magus of “All I am and all I have” to Them, to do with as
They Will, and thereby attain perfect Union with Them. Crowley says of Neptune:

The Mind of the Father said ‘Into Three!’ and immediately all things were so
divided.
This oracle . . . refers . . . to the division of Nature into the three active elements of
fire, air and water. Earth is a mixture of these three in diverse proportions. In this
division . . . the kingdom of fire fell to Hades or Pluto, that of air to Zeus or Jupiter, and
that of water to Poseidon or Neptune.
Neptune is, therefore, the Lord of Ocean, and especially of that Oceanus the greater
river that girdles the whole earth.
One is not wise to laugh, as the shallow laugh, at the supposed absurdities of old
geography. The earth is not a flat plate, but the solar system is; and on the rim of that
plate is that lonely sphere, Neptune, the outpost of the fortress of the Sun. So that it
was by a most happy accident that this planet was called by the name of the Lord of the
Oceanus. [The editor remarks: “It is also fortuitous that Pluto, which is beyond
Neptune, is equivalent to Hades which was considered by the ancient Greeks to be
below or beyond Oceanus.”]
Such is the far off base, in the wise and true dreamland of the philosophers, of the
palace of our knowledge. Let us see how their strange symbols have been hints of
truth, how the root of poetry has grown the tree of prose.
First, consider Neptune as a lonely Sentinel patrolling the confines of our camp.
Think of the solitude and darkness of that mysterious and eternal journey, what
thoughts must bloom. Mystic, austere, romantic, will they not be? What messenger
comet may approach from utmost space? The spirit of adventure thrills the blood,
frosted as it is by the contact with a space of icy-nothingness, save . . . meteors and dark
stars. Neptune is always starlit; at its distance from the Sun our Father [Sol] is hardly
bigger than any other star. So Neptune gallops through semi-eternal night with his
source of heat and motion too remote to cheer him, but with hope, faith, love.
How spiritual, how star-pure, must then be the secret thoughts of such a one, the
hermit of the Solar System? How indomitable, how lonely, how refined must be his
moods.
Yet there is something in solitude which sets men dreaming. Not always is that
dream the starry aspiration of the Knight vowed to some inaccessible lady, often there
steals through the faery window a glint of some fantastic mirth. In lighter moments,
there is something of the troubadour, and even of the Pierrot, in his melancholy craving
for the inaccessible. For it is not in the Neptunian nature to reach harbour. He longs
 for love and friendship; did he gain them he would retire. For nothing can satisfy that
thirst of things infinite; there is no goal attainable. Neptune is man’s boundless spirit;
heaven itself is too narrow for his desires. So into his nature comes the gay
coquettishness; he becomes conscious of his own anguish; and this is externalized as a
love of masquerade. He knows that love is unattainable; and so he plays at love. He
knows that happiness is beyond his reach; and so he seeks it by a violation of the limits
of existence. His true nature, thrilled through by the wisdom of the stars with whom he
holds such raptured communing in the centuries of that timeless vigil, leads him to
mystic trances, to visions of deity, to mysterious marriages with elements beyond our
system. For he, the Ishmael of the planets, never turns his face towards the sun.
But if he be not steeled to endure exile, to attain the snowy summits of
omniscience and bliss by means of the wise eremite, then the false nature mocks the
true. It revels, fantastic and fond, in comedies bitter at the core, in the use of strange
drugs or of perverse delights, in soulless and neurotic dreams, he seeks to satisfy his
soul.
Ah, Neptune is the soul!
And does this not fit the sea? Is not the sea at once infinitely calm, and infinitely
angered? does not the sea take strange shapes, break up the light into a myriad
fantastically coloured flaws? Illusion and art, chameleon and dragon, that is the sea! Is
not the sea now tender, now adorable, sunkissed, now terrible in its torment, a whirl of
insatiable desires? Did not Sappho fling herself into the sea, and did not Undine draw
hence the bitter joy of her veins?
Are we not the sea’s moods unstirred, unplumbed, and do they not harbour
monsters more terrible than the fancy of antiquity ever invented? . . . [L]et the romance
and the terror, the mystery and the unearthly joy of all the artists of the world direct
your glance; look upon the sea through their eyes, and draw into your soul the wonder
and the wantonness of it. Then understand how proper is the Ocean as an image of the
soul, how proper is Neptune to be the ruler of the Ocean. The soul!
. . . Neptune is the soul, with all its naked nerves played upon by rays of alien
systems, malicious, capricious, fairy, or else like harp-strings swept by some player
from beyond, too subtle and divine for his melodies to reach the ears of mortals.
Only that sympathy, that yearning, that other-worldliness in ourselves, that
influence of Neptune in our horoscopes, enables us to catch a far-away echo of that
lyre, faint, silvery music of the Psyche of our inmost being. . . .173

A later editor remarks of this that

. . . [Neptune’s] characteristics of secrecy were illustrated even in its mode of

discovery, for its existence was determined mathematically (from discrepancies in the
orbit of Uranus) before it was actually sighted. Its qualities of formlessness and secrecy
were strangely reflected on the physical plane by the discovery of gas lighting and the
upsurge of spiritualism in its modern form. . . . It is interesting to note that the symbol
of Neptune [Ψ], although obviously an allusion to the trident of the god Neptune, is
similar to the Greek letter psi, which has been adopted as their symbol by modern
researchers into E.S.P., a very Neptunian activity.174

Curiously, the exact date of the first verified telescopic sighting of Neptune was September 23,
1846.* 23 is the number of Eris, the Goddess of Discordianism, Lord of Chaos and Discord – phenomena
often associated with Neptune’s influence; September is the 9th month, most of which is taken up by the
Solar month Virgo, ruled by Persephone, and also associated with Eris, because of its rulership over fine-
grained phenomena of the sort studied by Chaos Science; and taking the year of Neptune’s discovery,
1846, 1 + 8 = 9, reflecting September, while 46 = 2 x 23 – and 2 is the Key Number of Chokmah, the
Sephirah of Neptune!

*In fact, it may not have been the first actual telescopic sighting of Neptune. In 1980 it was announced
that Galileo himself actually saw Neptune with his telescope in January of 1613 e.v., 233 years
before He was sighted by the German astronomer J. G. Galle, His official discoverer.
 Uncharacteristically, Galileo did not recognize the true nature of the moving object he sighted then,
which he sketched close to Jupiter – apparently the first clearly documented instance in which this
great Lord of the Starry Wastelands, famous for His traits of elusiveness, confusion, and
legerdemain, worked His elegant wiles upon someone who would become a supreme shaping force
upon the history of Western civilization and, ultimately, the whole world. 175

A final historical note on Neptune:

The following is taken from Jeremy Bernstein’s Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Records at
Farm Hall (Woodbury, NY: American Institute of Physics, 1996), which presents excerpts from
recordings taken by British Military Intelligence of conversations among German physicists interned
before the end of WW 2 at Farm Hall, a safe house in England run by British MI.

From report 4, pp. 119-120:

II. 6th August 1945

1. Shortly before dinner on the 6th of August I informed Professor Hahn that an announcement
had been made by the BBC . . . that an atomic bomb had been dropped. Hahn was completely
shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. . . .
With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant he was calmed down and we went down to
dinner where he announced the news to the assembled guests.

2. As was to be expected, the announcement was greeted with incredulity. The

following is a transcription of the conversation during dinner.

***

HAHN: They can only have done that if they have uranium isotope separation.

WIRTZ: They have it too.

HAHN: I remember Segré’s, Dunning’s, and my assistant Grosse’s work; they had to
separate a fraction of a milligram before the war, in 1939. [Segré is Emilio Segré . . ..
John Dunning was an experimental physicist who worked with Fermi on the early
fission experiments. Aristide von Grosse, who was at Columbia University at the
outbreak of the war, collaborated with Dunning and Alfred Nier on the early
experiments to show that 235U was the fissionable isotope of uranium. He had been
Hahn’s assistant in the early 1930s.]

LAUE: “235”?

HAHN: Yes, “235.”

HARTECK: That’s not absolutely necessary. If they let a uranium engine run, they
separate “93.”

[The Germans understood that what Harteck refers to as “93,” and which is now called
neptunium, was unstable. It decays into “94” – plutonium – with a half-life of 2.36
days. Hahn published a paper on this decay in Die Naturwissenschaften in 1942. To
make sense, if sense can be made of the colloquy that follows, let us review briefly here
the remarks made in the Prologue about the German knowledge of the use of
transuranic elements, such as plutonium, for weapons. Independently of developments
in the United States regarding transuranic elements, on the 17th of July 1940 von
Weizsaecker produced a report for the German project in which he suggested using
element 93 as a fissionable weapons fuel. It was not until 1942 that Hahn published the
 paper referred to above that showed that this element was unstable and completely
unsuitable for this purpose. In the meantime in August of 1941 Houtermans came up
with the idea of using element 94 – plutonium – which is long lived and as fissionable
as 235U. This idea must have made its way into the project since at his lecture before
the Nazi dignitaries on 26 February of 1942, Heisenberg refers to using “94.” In the
experiments that the Germans did to make a reactor they must have produced trace
amounts of plutonium. It did not seem to have occurred to them to do any
radiochemistry on these. Of course without a functioning reactor they never could have
made enough plutonium to use in a bomb. In what follows, Harteck and Hahn seem to
have forgotten that element 93 is unstable.]

HAHN: For that they must have an engine which can make sufficient quantities of
“93” to be weighed. [It is not clear what Hahn has in mind here. He is still talking
about “93.”]

GERLACH: If they want to get that, they must use a whole ton. [This reference to a
“ton” is equally obscure. A “ton” of what?]

HAHN: An extremely complicated business, for “93” they must have an engine which
will run for a long time. If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second
raters. Poor old Heisenberg.

LAUE: The innocent!

HEISENBERG: Did they use the word uranium in connection with this atomic bomb? .
..

ALL: No.

HEISENBERG: Then it’s got nothing to do with atoms, but the equivalent of 20,000
tons of high explosive is terrific.

WEIZSAECKER: It corresponds exactly to the factor 10 4. [Probably what

Weizsaecker has in mind here is that 1 kilogram of uranium completely fissioned would
correspond in energy to about 104 tons of exploding TNT . . . ]

GERLACH: Would it be possible that they have got an engine running fairly well, that
they have had it long enough to separate “93”? [As noted earlier, the word “engine” is
apparently a translation of the German word Maschine, which the German scientists
used throughout the war when referring to the reactor or pile.] . . .

– Ibid.

*****

The metal plutonium, whose atomic number is 93 (uranium is 92, plutonium is 94), is ruled by
Neptune. In the natal horoscope of Aleister Crowley, Neptune’s position is 2° 0’ Taurus in the 10th.
(Crowley was born at 11:30 p.m. Greenwich time [UT] on 10/12/1875 at Leamington Spa, United
Kingdom [1° 31’ W, 52° 18’ N]. His Ascendant is 5° 52’ Leo, MC 13° 10’ Aries. Sun, 19° Libra, 4th;
Moon, 22° Pisces 41’, 9th, in mutual reception by House with Jupiter, 7° 8’ Scorpio, 4th; Mercury, 13°
21’ Scorpio, 4th; Venus, 24° 24’ Libra, 4th; Mars, 22° 52’ Capricorn, 6th; Saturn, 19° 31’ Aquarius,
7th; Uranus, 19° 7’ Leo, 1st; Pluto, 23° 14’ Taurus, 11th; Moon’s North Node, 8° 27’ Aries, 9th. It is
of interest here that the numbers 19, 13, 31, and 11 are so prominent here.)
According to Crowley, 93 is the number of the Aeon of Horus/Aquarius and of the “current” that
kicked it off when he did his Cairo Working of 3/20/1904 e.v. at midnight (0 a.m.) in the Great Pyramid
at Cairo, Egypt, which apparently manifested as his writing of The Book of the Law at Cairo on April 8-
10 of that year. Later, the Nazis began their research into the occult – or perhaps began with such
research – that was ultimately concerned with odd uses of Crowley’s work (something which Crowley
hated, by the way – he detested the Nazis and all they stood for, and in fact worked closely with MI5
during WW2, to do what he could to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany). Eventually, because of the
Nazi takeover of Germany, WW 2 began, culminating in production and use of the first two nuclear
devices in a military capacity – the dawn of the Atomic Age. This was the quintessential Thelemic
moment, and it came about by use of fissionable materials such as uranium and plutonium. The fact that
neptunium, which can be produced from uranium, is unstable and liable to decay into plutonium is highly
significant not just to nuclear physicists and engineers, but also to students of occult history – for the
atomic number of neptunium, the number of protons in its nucleus, which define its essential chemical
nature, is 93.
 Chapter 3: Correspondences
Gods:

Egyptian: Djehuti (Thoth), Patron of Orphans, the living Logos, and Lord of the Moon (of which
Neptune is a sort of higher octave). Isis, as Goddess of Water. Amoun, as the creative Chiah (which,
like Neptune, rules the fine arts). Nuit, as the Zodiac. Tum, as the Sun descending into the Ocean at
Sunset. Ptah, as the Mummy (a form of the chrysalis, ruled by Neptune). Auramoth, Goddess of Water.
Asar, as Trump XII, The Hanged Man, representing martyrdom, ruled by Neptune. Hathoor, as Goddess
of Pleasure. Osiris, as Lord of the Aeon of Pisces/Osiris, an Aeonic expression of Neptune. the Element
Water as a Force.
Greek: Poseidon, God of Water and Oceanic Wisdom. Hermes-Djehuti, as Messenger or Logos.
The Christos, as the God of the Aeon of Pisces/Osiris. Pallas Athena/Medusa, as Wisdom springing full-
armed from the brain (the organ of Magickal procreation) of Zeus in Her Aspect of Pallas Athena; and as
Malkunofat, the Qlipphoth of Neptune and Key 23, Mem, in Her Aspect of the Medusa, Who rules the
use of venoms and poisons, straight and in homeopathic preparations, as enhancers in Operations of Sex-
Magick. Eris and Chaos, in association with Key 23, Mem, Neptune as a Path.
Roman: Neptune, God of Water. Rhea, Goddess Who flows. Mercury, as the Roman equivalent of
Hermes-Djehuti. Janus, representing the biblical separation of the “waters above from the waters below”
by the Firmament on the second day of Creation.
Sumerian:
Babylonian:
Hindu: Kali, as Patron of Orphans, Charity, and The Sacrifice or Sacrificers. Shiva, in His aspect of
the Power of the Sun on the Waters (Shiva Dancing), and also because His Trident suggests Neptune’s.
Vishnu, Preserver.* Akasa, the Matrix. Lingam, Water as Creative (Fiery) Power. Soma [apas].

*The Earth’s Oceans have preserved the ecological balances of Gaia and nurtured Her Life throughout
Her gigayears-long history; hence Vishnu is associated with Ocean, and thus with Neptune. Also,
Neptune rules equilibrium, both static and dynamic, hence homeostasis and ecological balance.
Vishnu preserves through homeostatic or ecological, dynamic balance, hence Vishnu is associated
with Neptune for this reason, as well.

Szekely (Romany Gypsy):

Chinese:
Japanese:
Judaism: IA, the Father
Christianity: The Christ, as God of the Christian Aeon of Pisces/Osiris. Jesus of Nazareth, as teacher
and martyr. Jesus the Crucified Christ. God the Father.
Islam:
Scandinavian: Odin, as the Magus and Lord of Wisdom (the Hanged Man of Trump XII of the Tarot,
which is associated with Key 23, Mem, Neptune’s Path, has frequently been interpreted as Odin hanging
upside-down by one foot on the tree Yggdrisil in His quest for wisdom)
The French Enlightenment: Madame La Guillotine
Russian:
Hungarian:
Africa:
Southeast Asia:
Celtic:
Polynesian: Ta’aroa (Tahitian) or Kanaloa (Hawaiian), Lord of Hell, the Ocean Storm, and the Deep
Sea. (The Cthulhu Mythos developed by H. P. Lovecraft and other writers postulates numerous links
between Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, of Whom Cthulhu was one; Sumerian religion; Haitian Magick;
and Tahitian religions.)
Native Australian:
Eskimo:
Central American:
 American Indian:
American folklore:
Science-fiction:
The Land of Oz: The Wizard (who was, after all, an illusionist par excellence, not a true Magickian)
Voudon: Olokun, God of Oceanic Abysses and the Unconscious.
SubGenius: “Bob,” as chief martyr of the Church of the SubGenius, and He Who Succeeds by
Screwing Up Totally. St. Gerry Reith, a High Church scribe and early martyr of the Church. JHVH-1,
Who is duplicitous, sneaky, cruel, treacherous, confused, and a lush Who makes too many stupid bar-
bets; He is also a SubGenius analog of Odin. Nhee-Ghee, the Great Discordian Malefic (He is also
associated with Saturn).
Discordianism: Eris. Chaos. The Emperor Joshua Norton.
H. P. Lovecraft: Cthulhu, Who sleeps in His house in drowned R’lyeh. H. P. Lovecraft Himself, as
First Prophet of the Starry Wisdom Cult and as the Sufferer, who was also a battered child (Djehuti,
associated with Neptune because He is Lord of Orphans, is also Protector of Battered Children).
Stephen King:
LaVeyan Satanism:

God-Name in Hebrew:

World Religions:

SubGenius (because of its martyred founder, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, as well as the way it confuses all
outsiders and most insiders [Erisianism]). Islam (it came into existence in the Aeon of Osiris). The
Starry Wisdom Cult of Lovecraft (associated with Neptune’s Sephirah, 2, Chokmah). Christianity.
Ninpo taijutsu (because of its subtlety and flowing aspects).

Archangel:

Gabriel (see Liber 777, Col. LIX, “Archangels of the Quarters”; Gabriel is also associated with
Water, ruled by Neptune)
RoTsIAL (Ratziel, Archangel of Assiah – see Column XCIX of Liber 777)

Angelic Choir:

Chasmalim (see Liber 777, Column C, Notes)

AOPNIM (Choir in Briah, Liber 777, Col. LXXXVI)

Angel:

AOPNIM (Liber 777, Col. C)

Raphael (Angel of Briah, Liber 777, Col. LXXXV)
MeLIEL (angel of Water and Key 23; see Liber 777, Key LXI)

Angels given by Barrett, et al.:

Generally speaking, the Angels of Friday (since Neptune is a higher octave of Venus, Who rules
Friday) and Summer go with Neptune. The former include Anael, Rachiel, Sachiel, ruling the day;
Sarabotes (king), Amahiel (minister), Aba (minister), Abalidoth (minister), Blaef (minister), rulers of the
air on Friday (Barrett says that the wind which the angels of the air are subject to is the West wind);
Setchiel, Chedusitaniel, Corat, Tamuel, Tenaciel, angels of the Third Heaven ruling in the East; Turiel,
Coniel, Babiel, Kadie, Maltiel, Huphaltiel, angels of the Third Heaven ruling in the West; Peniel,
Penael, Penat, Raphael, Ranie, Doremiel, angels of the Third Heaven ruling in the North; Porosa,
Sachiel, Chermiel, Samael, Santanael, Famiel, angels of the Third Heaven ruling in the South.
For angels of the Summer, Barrett gives Gargatel, Tariel, and Gaviel.

Olympic Planetary Spirit:

Intelligence:

Spirit:

Niksa, King of the Elemental Spirits of Water

Spirits given by Bardon, Barrett, et al.:

Ruler of the Element:

ThRShIM (see Liber 777, Col. LX)

The Four Worlds:

Briah, the Creative World (in the individual, this is the Psyche, seat of memory, creativity, etc.)

Secret Names of the Four Worlds:

SN

Supreme Elemental King:

Thahebyobeaatan (Col. LVIII of Liber 777)

Name of Planet in Hebrew:

[Dream; Sleep; Hypnosis; Vision; The Prophet]

Commandment (from Exodus 20: 3-17):

Don’t worship idols.

(You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you
shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth
generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who
love me and keep my commandments.)

Exodus 20: 4-6.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt:

Plague of Locusts (Exodus 10: 13-15).

Verses of the Creation Story from Genesis (Genesis1-4):

Genesis 1: 1-8, 20-23; 3:1-5; 4: 1-16.

Cantos from the Inferno of Dante Alighieri :

The 10 Bolgias of the 8th Circle

Cantos from the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri :

The Barrier of Molten Glass passed just prior to entering Heaven; the next to the last part of
Purgatory
Cantos from the Paradiso of Dante Alighieri :

The area just below the Empyrean

Orders of Qlippoth:

Order of the Qlippoth: NgOGIEL (Ghagiel), Hinderers (see Liber 777, Col. VIII)
Prince of the Qlippoth: Samael
Demon-King: Ariton (see Liber 777, Col. LXVIII)
The Ten Hells in Seven Palaces: ShAOL (Sheol, the Grave) (see Liber 777, Col. CVI)

Qlipphotic Spirit (from Kenneth Grant):

The 23rd kala is under the dominion of Malkunofat, who lies in the depth of the watery abyss.
According to Kenneth Grant,

[H]e may be aroused by a shrill stridulation of his name in the key of ‘G’ sharp
(upper register). The sigil should be painted in deep blue on an inverted triangle of sea-
green hue. His number is 307, which is that of VRIATz, a ‘night demon’ of the second
decanate of Scorpio, and having therefore an essentially sexual reference. It is also the
number of LZRO, meaning ‘to sow,’ derived from the root ZRO, ‘semen.’
Kenneth Grant, Nightside f Eden (Skoob Books Publishing, 1994), p. 217

Other Qlippoth:

The Spaalg, an octopoid demon described in Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean (New York: DAW
Books, 1982), in “The Fishing of the Demon-Sea,” pp. 164-174. Shea says of it:

. . . Through the left-hand doorway, a shamadka came gliding like a tiny ship – the
polished bowl its bows, the silver strings its rigging – full to overflowing with its cargo
of music.
The instrument was strangely festooned with what at first seemed a sea vine,
shaggy purplish stalks draping both bowl and fretboard. But almost at once we realized
their supple muscularity, and it was their caress extracting these limpid euphonies from
the shamadka. A voice began to sing, a soprano that was icy-sweet like children’s
temple choirs . . . .
***
It trailed astern of the instrument, where a flabby tapered sack of skin ballooned
along just under the surface. Near its peak this bruise-colored bag of flesh – bald as
bone and blubber-soft – was puckered into a jagged-rimmed crater. Half cupped in this
and half leaking into a maze of bays and channels branching from it, was the being’s
eye – a viscous, saffron puddle all starred within by black, pupillary nodes that
burgeoned, coalesced, diminished or multiplied by fissure into smaller wholes, their
evolution as incessant as the whole eye’s melting flux within its mazy orbit.
A mouth the thing had as well, down near the juncture of the skin-sack with the
tentacular fronds. It was an obese blossom of multiple lips like concentrically packed
petals. All of them moved, and you couldn’t pinpoint among them the exact source of
their utterance.
A face you had to call it, though the stomach rebelled and, for all the ambiguity of
the features, it was a poisonously expressive face, always conveying something
searching and sardonic in the way its pupillaries constellated.A veritable chorus of
derisive smiles rippled across its lips as it sang on.

The Spaalg is a master of seductiveness, guile, mind-control, sadism, confusion, distraction, and the
art of music. Gildmirth, its erstwhile victim, says of it:
 Spaalgs have a technique for infecting shape-changers. Their larvae lie integrated
in the body of a larger demon. If a man, or any creature, would acquire another being’s
shape, he or it must enter a specimen and become congruent with its form, to learn it.
If a Spaalg infects the study-specimen, it can transfer to the shape-shifter, and infect
him by any means it devises. Some of the Spaalg’s nerves it engrafted onto mine, at
places where they were naturally suited to receive the amplification of its own passions.
Now, raving lunacy would follow any loss of either the sea’s gold [which Gildmirth is
forced by the demon to crave, as an addictive drug], or its sorceries and the infinity of
shapes it offers me on which to practice them [ditto]. Here [where gold and the
Spaalg’s sorcery are available] my spirit dies at length, by attrition. Above [where they
are not], insane hungers would tear it to pieces within days.

Ibid., p. 174

Article of Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America):

Article Two

Right to keep and bear arms

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free Sate, the right
of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

(“The heart of Neptune is Mars.” – Aleister Crowley)

Other amendments to the United States Constitution:

Of the amendments after the tenth, Neptune rules the infamous XVIII th amendment – Prohibition –
ratified January 16, 1919 and effective as of January 16, 1920, because of which organized crime on a
gigantic scale became entrenched in the economy of this nation, from which it has never been since
removed. The rationale behind Prohibition was confused and ill-thought, it created the perfect
environment in which crime and vice could thrive and prosper, it poisoned and blighted countless
American lives, it was sustained in effect due to denial and self-deception. It is therefore the
quintessential Neptunian legislation. This amendment was repealed by the passage of the XXIst
amendment, ratified and effective December 5, 1933; that amendment is ruled by Uranus and Pluto
together.
Similarly, all federal laws prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and consumption of recreational drugs,
especially hemp or hashish, pornography, and other victimless crimes are ruled by Neptune, and their
(hypothetical) repeal by Uranus and Pluto.

General astrological classification:

Fruitful; malefic; warm (reflecting His anomalously high physical temperature, relative to His
distance from Sol; see preceding section on His astronomy, and remarks in the previous chapter for
Uranus concerning His lower octave, Venus, in this respect); moist; magnetic; feminine. Jupiter, with
Whom He shares His dignities, rules those things that are large and which expand; Neptune rules those
things which tend to be vast, and expand all out of proportion to everything else, all expectations, all
predictions, and even the conceivable.

General Qaballistic classification:

His Sephirah is Key 2, Chokmah, at the intersection of the Second Plane and the Right-Hand Pillar of
Mercy of the traditional Tree of Life. Before the discovery of the Outer Planets, the Sphere of the Zodiac
or Fixed Stars was attributed to this Sephirah (see Liber 777, Col. VI, “The Heavens of Assiah” and
associated endnotes in that text).
Neptune’s Path is Key 23, Mem, connecting Sephiroth 5 and 8.

General attributions of the Tarot:

 Key 2: The four Twos, the four Knights.
Key 23: Trump XII, The Hanged Man.

Title of Tarot Trump:

The Spirit of the Mighty Waters.

Correct design of Tarot Trump (Golden Dawn):

The figure of a hanged or crucified man (generally in an inverted position). (Note: This figure can
suggest Christ Crucified or Odin hanging on the World-Tree in order to acquire wisdom)

Titles and Attributes of Court Cards:

Knight (King) of Wands:

The Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, King of the Spirits of Fire.
Image: A fiery knight, with a black and fiery horse. According to Waite, he is riding through a
desert, and wears clothing decorated with salamanders, a fiery plume streaming from his
helmet. According to Crowley, the sigil of Leo appears in this card, as well.
Attributes: Rules 20 degrees Scorpio to 20 degrees Sagittarius (mid-November to mid-
December, or about November 11 through December 11), and the Sign Sagittarius (mutable
Fire).* The Fiery part of Fire; activity, generosity, fierceness, impetuosity, pride,
impulsiveness, swiftness in unpredictable actions. Ill-dignified, he is evil-minded, cruel,
bigoted, and brutal.
Knight (King) of Cups:
The Lord of the Waves and the Waters, King of the Hosts of the Sea
Image:
Waite: A knight wearing a winged helmet rides through a desert toward a river and the
mountains, carrying a cup, dressed in clothing decorated with red fish.
Crowley: A winged knight riding a white horse from the sea. His upraised right hand holds
a cup, above which is a crab. There is a peacock in the lower right corner of the card;
the wings of the knight are stylized extensions of the peacock’s tail.**
Attributes: Rules from 20 degrees Aquarius to 20 degrees Pisces (mid-February to mid-March,
or about February 10 through March 11), and the Sign Pisces (mutable Water). Represents
the Fiery part of Water, its power of solution and dissolution. Associated with passivity,
gracefulness, the dilettante. Loving and amiable, quick to respond but not enduring,
sensitive but with little material depth. Ill-dignified, he is sensual, idle, and untruthful. The
essence of his nature is innocence and purity.
Knight (King) of Swords:
The Lord of the Winds and the Breezes, the King of the Spirits of Air.
Image:
Waite: A knight riding furiously through the wind, brandishing his sword. His clothing is
decorated with butterflies and red birds.
Crowley: Four wings issue from the tip of his helmet (they look something like helicopter
blades); these enable him, together with his horse, to fly. In his right hand is his
extended sword. In his left is extended a shorter sword. Below are three birds.
Attributes: Rules 20 degrees Taurus to 20 degrees Gemini (mid-April to mid-May, about April
10 to May 10), and the Sign Gemini (mutable Air). The fiery part of air, the violent part of
motion applied to an apparently manageable element, the idea of attack, activity, skill,
subtlety, cleverness, fierce, delicate, courageous. He is the prey of his own idea, which
comes to him without reflection. Ill-dignified, he is incapable of decision; any action taken
by him is easily thwarted by any opposition, and he represents the futility of inadequate
violence of force.
Knight (King) of Disks, Coins, or Pantacles:
The Lord of the Wide and Fertile Land, King of the Spirits of Earth
 Image: Waite: A Knight on a black horse bears a Pentacle, held before him; his helmet is
crowned with oak. Crowley: A dark knight on a dark horse in a field of ripe wheat; his
helmet is topped by a stag’s head.
Attributes: Rules 20 degrees Leo to 20 degrees Virgo (mid-August to mid-September, about
August 11 through September 11), and the Sign Virgo (mutable Earth). The Fiery part of
Earth. Tends to be dull, brutal, heavy, preoccupied with material things, laborious, and
patient. Has little intellectual grasp of things, even those with which he is closely
concerned. Strong instincts. Ill-dignified, he is hopelessly stupid, slavish, incapable of
foresight, churlish, instinctively jealous and envious of others’ good fortune and high status,
and interfering, with a tendency to meddle in the affairs of others (busybody).

*In the West, the Gregorian calendar was substituted for the Julian calendar in 1582, to account for leap-
years and other factors not accounted for by the latter. Great Britain, however, waited until 1750 to
adopt the Gregorian calendar, and put it into effect in 1752. At the same time, the beginning of the
legal year was changed from March 25 to January 1. At that time, in England as well as her colonies
in America and elsewhere, 11 days were dropped from the calendar, i.e., were added to every date in
the year, so that, e.g., January 1 became January 12, etc. Subtracting this number of days for the
calendrical ascriptions given by Crowley, the Golden Dawn, et al. for the Court Cards, which runs
from about the 10th or 11th of one month to around the same day on the next, changes them to about
the 1st of one month to the 1st of the next – i.e., to a given calendrical month, in the usual sense of the
term. Thus the Knight of Wands would rule November; the Knight of Cups would rule February;
the Knight of Swords rules May; and the Knight of Disks rules August.
For more on calendars and calendrical changes, see The Book of Calendars, edited by Frank
Parise (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1982).

**Perhaps represents the Peacock Angel, Shaîtan, the Yezidi God. Neptune represents all aspects of the
Satanic, i.e., Qlippoth of Saturn, having to do with lies, deception, seduction, poison masquerading
as beauty. Christianity took its name for the Lord of Evil from the Yezidi God after Christian
Crusaders encountered the Yezedi, a Bedouin tribe that had converted to the Shi’ite sects of Islam.
The Yezedi were elite warriors who were the shock-troops and tactical-squad of the Islamic military
response to the Crusades. After their first encounters with these superlative fighters, in battle,
claiming “their God must be the Devil himself!” So the peacock, as Satan, is associated with
Neptune and thus with the Knight of Cups.

Titles and Attributes of Numbered Cards (Liber 777, Col.s CXXXIII—CXXXVI):

2 of Wands (Clubs): Mars in Aries, “Dominion” – first decanate of Aries (0° – 9° 59’ 59” Aries)
2 of Cups (Hearts): Venus in Cancer, “Love” – first decanate of Cancer (0° – 9° 59’ 59” Cancer)
2 of Swords (Spades): Luna in Libra, “The Lord of Peace Restored” – first decanate of Libra (0° –
9° 59’ 59” Libra)
2 of Coins/Discs/Pantacles (Diamonds): Jupiter in Capricorn, “The Lord of Harmonious Change” –
first decanate of Libra (0° – 9° 59’ 59” Capricorn)

Alchemical and Pythagorean Associations:

Attributions from the I Ching and Taoist Cosmology:

The Element Water. In the I Ching, this is represented by the Trigram K’an, “Water”:

___ ___
_______
___ ___

In the King Wen arrangement, the Hexagrams including this Trigram include 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 29, 39, 40,
47, 48, 59, 60, 63, 64.
 Water is associated with the North, Winter, the Hidden, cold, fluid, salt, and the color black.
Controls kidneys and bladder. Associated with the Black Tortoise, and the Planet Mercury. Yang: a
wave. Yin: a brook. Quicksilver (mercury metal, the chemical element Hg, atomic number 80). Aqua
fortis. Vitriol. Water is produced by the Element Metal and is destroyed by the Element Earth; it
produces the Element Wood, and destroys the Element Fire.

Attributions from Ninpo (Way of the Ninja, Way of Wisdom) and Shinto (Way of the Kami or Gods):

The Element Water. In The Book of Five Rings, the classic Japanese text on strategy and kendo
(Way of the Sword), in the chapter on Water (“The Water Book”), Miyamoto Musashi discusses methods
of victory as the long-sword form of the Ni Ten Ichi school of strategy.
Of the five attitudes, feelings, and strategies (godai) of ninpo taijutsu, Neptune rules Water (sui no
waza). According to Jack Hoban, in Ninpo: Living and Thinking as a Warrior (Chicago: Contemporary
Books, 1988):

In the water feeling, you have arrived at the realization that you must respond to
the attack. All humans are incomplete, and the fact that you may not be strong enough,
fast enough, or well-enough prepared for the attack is normal and natural. Imagine the
queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that fear tends to generate, and move back at a
45-degree angle, leading from that spot. Breathe from that spot, also. As you do this,
you should have the same feeling as you would have if you were to attempt to sit down
on a chair that is suddenly pulled away. Your back foot doesn’t “step” to where it ends
up. It is brought back so that you don’t fall.
Have a training partner try to grab you, and use this same smooth, back-pedalling
movement to glide back and away from his grasp.
Again, keep the responsive feeling, and try the sui no waza. It is the feeling, not
the movement itself, that defines the strategy.

Ibid., p. 139

Other Magickal Correspondences, according to Barrett, et. al:

Day of the Week ruled by Neptune:

Geocentric: Friday night

Heliocentric: Friday night

Hours of the Day ruled by Neptune:

Geocentric: Third, tenth, seventeenth hours after Sunset

Heliocentric: Same

Grades of the Temple:

9° = 2nd Grade: Magus (2nd rank of 3rd Order)

Colors:

For the King, Queen, Emperor, and Empress scales of color, Liber 777 gives respectively:

For Key 2, Chokmah: pure soft blue; grey; blue pearl-grey, like mother-of-pearl; and white,
flecked red, blue, and yellow.
For Key 23, Mem: deep blue; sea-green; deep olive-green; and white, flecked purple, like mother-
of-pearl.
 Oken gives lavender, mauve, sea-green, aquamarine, smoky grey, etheric colors, and “the colors of
the matter of which dreams are composed.”176
De Vore adds to these smoke-blue and “possibly peculiar shades of gray.”177
Goldstein-Jacobson adds “iridescent & changeable colors.”178
The colors of smoke, mist, and fog, especially the last, are Neptunian, since they shroud, hide, and
deceive. All colors associated with the sea, with lakes, rivers, and other aspects of Water are Neptune’s
as well, because of His rulership of Water. Therefore colors such as coral and pearl are His, as well as
various blues, purples, and greens which are associated with denizens of marine environments, which are
quintessential subjects of His domains.

Patterns and compounds of color:

Illusive and changeable colors, such as those found in slicks of oil on water, are associated with
Neptune, because these traits are so characteristic of Him. So are the splendid computer-generated
compositions from Julia sets or subsets of the Mandelbrot Set, in which colors are assigned to given
points in the display according to the number of computations necessary to determine whether a given
point is in the set or not. (That is, a particular color is assigned to a point in the Cartesian Plane if the
number of computations necessary to determine whether it is a member of a given set falls within the
range of numbers assigned to that color, e.g., ranges such as 1, 2-3, 4-8, 9-15, or whatever.) As an art
form, the Mandelbröt Set is especially appropriate as an example of members of Neptune’s Sphere, since
He rules beauty, higher mathematics, and computer software, all of which are strongly associated with
the Mandelbröt Set.

Forms, shapes, lineal figures, geomantic figures, figures related to pure number, and numerological
associations:

For Key 2, the following forms are associated with Neptune: the Line, since it is determined by 2
points; and the Cross, because it comprises two crossed line segments.
For Key 23, the Greek Cross Solid and the Mystic Rose of 22 Petals are associated with Neptune. So
are the three Geomantic figures of the Watery Triplicity of Signs: Populus and Via, for Cancer; Rubeus,
for Scorpio; Laetitia, for Pisces. All fractal forms are associated with this Key, especially the beautiful
Mandelbröt Set, the apotheosis of the mathematical and aesthetic beauty ruled by Neptune, because of
the associations of the number 23 with Chaos, the science of which is concerned with fractal
mathematics. Finally, curved lines, rhythmic curves, and nebulous and chaotic forms in general are all
associated with this Key.
Numerologically speaking, the numbers 2 and 23 are associated with Neptune, since these are His
Key Numbers. So are the Mystic Numbers of the Sephiroth associated with these Keys, respectively (1 +
2) = 3 and (1 + 2 + ... + 23) = 276
In addition, the sum of the values of the letters of the name of the Hebrew letter associated with His
Path, MIM, is 40 + 10 + 600 = 650 = 5 x 13 x 10. Further, the sum of the digits of this number is 6 + 5 +
0 = 11, and 1 + 1 = 2 (the Key Number of His Sephirah!). So the numbers 5 (Geburah, Mars), 13 (Gimel,
Luna), 10 (Malkuth, Earth and Saturn), and 11 (Aleph, Uranus) are associated with Him, numbers with
which He already has other affinities because of His Qaballistic functions and astrological characteristics,
as well.
Other numbers associated with Him include the sums of the values of the letters spelling out the
God-names associated with His Keys, IA for Key 2, whose sum is 10 + 1 = 11 (1 + 1 = 2), and AL for
Key 23, whose sum is 1 + 30 = 31 (3 + 1 = 4). The first reinforces His association with 11 because of the
value of MIM, the second shows an association between Him and the current of the New Aeon, the
number of which is 3 x 31 = 93. Further, in the case of the second, AL is the God-name of Chesed,
whose Planet is Jupiter, with Whom Neptune co-rules the Signs of His strength; the number of Chesed is
4, the sum of the digits of the sum of AL, and also the value of Daleth, Key 14, whose Planet is Venus,
Neptune’s lower octave, still another reinforcement of the association between Neptune and 4.
Notice that all these numbers, save for the sum of the values of MIM and that of the digits of the number
of AL, are prime numbers. This is appropriate, since prime numbers, divisible only by themselves and 1,
are slippery little so-and-sos to get hold of conceptually and psychologically, a trait analogous to
Neptune’s quality of elusiveness.

Magick Square:
 The Mystic Rose of 22 Petals (Regardie)
The Mystic Roses of 55, 136, etc. Petals
There is no 2 x 2 Magick Square

Stones, gems, and metals:

Liber 777 gives the star ruby and the turquoise for Key 2, and the beryl and aquamarine for Key 23.
Oken gives coral, aquamarine, ivory, platinum, neptunium, and radium. 179
Goldstein-Jacobson adds amethyst, and such artificial substances as glass, porcelain, and imitation or
synthetic materials. 180
De Vore adds lithium.181*
Watters adds the pearl, made by oysters, oceanic creatures, and salt, because of the saltiness of ocean
waters.**
Neptune rules the actinides, the chemical elements which have atomic numbers 89 (actinium)
through 103. These are analogs of the Uranus-ruled lanthanides, beings the next series of that kind up
from the latter in the Periodic Table.
Metals whose dissolved salts are plentiful in sea-water are Neptunian. Calcium carbonate, or
limestone, is a rock which forms in the ocean, and could not form elsewhere due to the conditions of
temperature, pressure, and chemistry necessary for its creation, and it is therefore ruled by Neptune. † The
shells of marine animals, some of which are used in jewelry, or prized for their beauty and/or rarity, and
so qualify as precious or semiprecious stones, are Neptunian.
By the same token, iodine (Z=53) is ruled by Neptune, because of its pervasive presence in water. ‡
Curiously, iodine is necessary for the functions of the thyroid gland, which produces thyroxin, a hormone
that enables the body to convert stored food to metabolic energy, reflecting Neptune’s association with
Chokmah, Pure Force, the Father, Whose Element is Fire/Spirit.
It is of interest in this context that the metal of Mercury, quicksilver or mercury metal (Z=80), dis-
plays such Neptunian properties as elusiveness (try grabbing some with your bare hands!). The Sign
rulerships of mercury are 180° across the sky from those of Neptune, and therefore in opposition to
Neptune’s dignities, so that they provide reflections or mirrors of Neptune’s qualities – qualities with
which Mercury Himself, like so many Mercurial phenomena and the metal mercury, is richly endowed!
Neptune is also one of the rulers of natural gas and oil. Though these are not solid substances, and in
that sense are not “stones” or “gems,” they are highly valuable sources of energy for technology and for
use in the home, and therefore sources of wealth, as gemstones are, and thus subtle versions of precious
stones.
Neptune rules fluids of all kinds. These include not only liquids, but also gases, plasmas, glasses,
and matter so finely divided that it flows like a liquid, e.g., jeweler’s rouge (pumice) and finest-grade
powdered sugar. In terms of physical phases, Neptune rules the liquid phase, as Uranus rules the gaseous
phase, Pluto the plasmoid phase, and Saturn the solid phase; but Neptune also rules the fluid or flowing,
Watery aspects of any of the latter three phases.
Finally, the element helium (Z=2) is ruled by Neptune, since its atomic number is 2, that of
Neptune’s Sephirah, and is found naturally only in gaseous form. Element 23, vanadium, likewise is
ruled by Neptune, since its atomic number is the same as the Key Number of Neptune’s Path, Mem. And
Element 40, zirconium, is ruled by Neptune as well, since its atomic number is the same as the value of
Mem.

* Though since the word itself literally means “stone substance,” it is more likely to be ruled by Saturn.
This is especially so today because of the ominous connotations due to this metal’s use in
manufacture of thermonuclear bombs.

**Traditionally, however, salt is associated with Saturn.

†
Saturn traditionally rules this mineral; as in the case with salt, this indicates the delegation to Neptune
of certain of the rulerships of Saturn.
‡
Traditionally, this chemical element is ruled by Luna – of which Neptune is a higher octave.
Herbs and Trees:

Liber 777 gives the following: For Key 2, amaranth, as a “flower of immortality”; the mistletoe, for
similar reasons; and the Bo tree of Buddha, because it symbolizes Buddha’s Enlightenment, and has
leaves whose shape suggests the phallus, implying the Masculine Principle, the Father, of Chokmah. For
Key 23, it gives the lotus, as the traditional plant of Water, as well as water-plants of all kinds.
Oken gives plants from which recreational drugs of any kind are extracted, including marijuana
(which, incidentally, is sacred to the Hindu God Shiva); coca (the source of cocaine); the opium poppy
(source of all opiates, from opium and laudanum to morphine, heroin, codeine, etc.); devil’s weed
[jimson weed or datura?]; peyote; and psilocybin mushrooms (this last is a fungus, not a plant, but since
Neptune tends to blur boundary-lines, it will be included in this section). He suggests that for the same
reason, tobacco herb and coffee beans are Neptunian in nature. And he adds that along with the Moon,
Neptune rules over certain plants with occult properties, such as orchids.183 Neptune rules seductive or
addictive pleasures, which naturally include all narcotic drugs, tobacco products, coffees and teas; things
that give or enhance aesthetic pleasure, such as psychedelic drugs; and the occult, in the sense of that
which is hidden or mysterious, which includes plants used for occult purposes, such as orchids or
mandrake root. So Oken’s ascriptions here are appropriate for Neptune.
Goldstein-Jacobson gives parasitic and medicinal plants of all kinds, tobacco, plants which yield
(presumably recreational) drugs, kelp, and dwarfed plants and trees.^184 Neptune rules seducers,
betrayers, plagues, and other things that are often associated with parasites, as well as hospitals, so the
first two are appropriate. Tobacco, given also by Oken, is a recreational as well as a ritual drug, thus
ruled by Neptune. Kelp is a sea-plant, hence under Neptune’s rulership as Lord of the Sea and all in it.
Neptune rules torture, cruelty, and confinement, all of which could be said to be involved in the process
of creating bonsai (dwarf) trees, so He could be said to rule dwarf plants, at least those deliberately
created by gardener’s arts.
All plants that live in the sea or in the world’s great rivers and lakes are under Neptune’s dominion
as Lord of the Sea.
Barley, oats, grapes, potatoes, etc., from which the most common potable alcohols, such as whiskey,
vodka, wine, ale, and beer, can be distilled are likewise ruled, at least in part, by Neptune. (The little
yeast organisms in the solutions that produce these drinks are Neptunian, as well, since they do the
ultimate donkey-work of converting sugars, natural or artificial, into ethanol.)
As Lord of Pisces, Neptune rules all hidden violence, from guerrilla warfare to assassinations, as
well as murder in any form. As diurnal esoteric Lord of Scorpio, which rules all toxic substances, from
snake- or spider-venom and strychnine or cyanide to industrial waste, He rules all poisons, the secret
murder-weapons par excellence. Therefore He also rules all poisonous plants and mushrooms,
particularly the amanita varieties of mushroom, which are psychoactive in small quantities and deadly in
only slightly larger doses.

Animals and Other Organisms:

Liber 777 gives “Man,” for Key 2, and “Eagle-Snake-Scorpion,” the Cherubim of Water, for Key 23.
(Interestingly, Central America’s Christ-Teacher, Quetzlcoatl, also known as Kukulcan, the Feathered
Serpent, is a quasi-composite of these three animals. Also, the flag of Mexico shows an eagle attacking a
serpent (the result of an error of understanding by Latinos of the real symbol of native Mexican culture,
an eagle bearing a scroll). Neptune in Scorpio is thus associated with Mexican and Central American
cultures.
Just as Uranus rules the animals of the air, Saturn those of the land, and Pluto those which live near
the vents of volcanoes, in hot springs, and close to the deep-ocean vents near mid-ocean ridges where
new material continually wells out to form new seed-bed from the earth’s hot interior, so Neptune rules
the animals of the oceans and seas. These include all teleost (bony) fishes, whose bony skeletons evolved
in the calcium salt-rich environment of the ocean; all squaline or cartilaginous fish, the sharks, the rays,
etc.; shellfish, actually arthropod, and molluscan invertebrates, whose soft, moist, tender bodies inside
their hard shells or chitinous integuments are so quintessentially Neptunian; the whales, including all
porpoises and mammalian dolphins; the pinnipeds, such as seals, sea-lions, manatees, and dugongs; and
cephalopods, such as octopi, squid, and cuttlefish, so perfectly adapted to the water and so lovely in
motion within it. Glabrous land-animals that prefer to keep their skins moist and/or which like water and
swim well, such as pigs, elephants, and human beings,* are likewise ruled by Neptune, at least in part.
Finally, the fugu-fish, a coveted delicacy among gourmets the world over, especially in Japan, ruled by
Neptune because it is a teleost fish, is also under His dominion because, when improperly prepared by the
cook, the fish is deadly poisonous and will kill the person eating it. Also, the fish’s liver-toxin that is the
culprit in this case supposedly has been used as a drug to induce a zombie-like state in unwitting victims,
and thus comes under Neptune’s dominion as Lord of deceit, betrayal, covert violence, etc.**

*Elaine Morgan, in Descent of Woman (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), makes a very good case for
the thesis that at one point in our evolution, we ourselves temporarily returned to the sea, at least to
the tidewaters of the coasts of Africa and India, some 3-5 million years ago, in order to avoid the
perils of life on the savanna. There, she argues, we evolved our characteristically large buttocks,
distinctively shaped pair of (female) breasts, and a number of other important aspects of our physical
and psychospiritual makeup. Because of this, Neptune is clearly one of the rulers of Homo sapiens
as a species . The other is Uranus, ruling Aquarius, the cherub of which is The Man, for we are a
Star-striving species, astronomers and space-travelers, both under the dominion of Uranus.

**See Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), for his thesis
concerning probable use of fugu-fish poison and bufotonin in the preparation of drugs used to
transform healthy human beings into half-alive zombies.

Venomous animals are Neptunian, because of Neptune’s diurnal esoteric rulership of Scorpio, and
thus of all venoms, toxins, and poisons, which are traditionally ruled by Scorpio. Toads which secrete
psychoactive substances are Neptunian, not only because these secretions can be quite lethally poisonous,
as well, but also because they, like fugu-fish liver-toxin, supposedly are used to make the drugs used in
the creation of zombies.
Animals which camouflage themselves to look like other animals, such as the viceroy butterfly,
which resembles the bad-tasting monarch butterfly, or which feign death, such as the ‘possum, are ruled
by Neptune.
Animals which, like cats and human beings, cherish their sleep and often spend a good deal of time
at it, are therefore at least partly ruled by Neptune. Such animals include all predatory mammals, among
others. (Neptune, the Great Illusionist, presents a seductive, lovely face to us most of the time. But
within the depths of His Ocean is the shark, a pre-eminently Neptunian organism. As Crowley says, “In
the heart of Neptune is Mars.”)
Neptune is Lord of animals which, like the fox, adopt ruses to escape their enemies. He likewise
rules all animals which symbolize or incarnate wisdom, such as the aforementioned fox, the elephant, the
mule, and the owl. For this reason, a Neptunian animal par excellence is therefore the snake or serpent,
the traditional symbol of Wisdom in all its aspects, including guile and subtlety, which is also a logo of
Scorpio, of which Neptune is esoteric Lord. Venomous snakes of whatever species are thus especially
under the dominion of Neptune, both because they are serpents and because of their venom.
Neptune rules the crocodile, above all, the Nile crocodile. That animal not only lives in rivers, and
is thus associated with Neptune for that reason, but also strikes from concealment, a Neptunian tactic.
Set, the God of Evil of the Egyptians,* was originally a crocodile-God, and in His apotheosis expressed
very clearly those aspects of Saturn closely associated with Neptune’s malefic nature, such as covert
malice, etc.

*Actually, Set has a function rather like Kali does in Her culture: as an agency of Heaven’s justice. He
is, as it were, the Divine Cop, the ultimate ecological check-and-balance Who acts to destroy the
sources of great evil before they can destroy the civilization or the world. If Horus is the ancient
Egyptian equivalent of the Archangel Michael, Set is a sort of divine Green Beret, a one-God Special
Forces Unit that gets called in when no one else can do the job. He is therefore a frightening being,
one whose business-end it is wise to avoid. Out of fear of Him, over the ages many have associated
Him with the objects of His work rather than with the results of that work, so that He has thereby
gained a reputation as an evil God. But He is no more evil than a tornado, which is Gaia’s way of
 balancing out Her heat-budget when no other way presents itself and the alternative is ecological
disaster in still worse forms.

He rules bees. Bees display totally selfless altruism and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole hive,
qualities eminently Neptunian. They also have a powerful venom in their stings, essentially identical
with black widow spider venom, though there is far less of it per bee-sting than per spider-bite. Neptune
rules venoms of all kinds, as well as barbed weapons, such as bee-stings. Finally, traditionally bees are
associated with Aphrodite, Whose higher octave is Neptune. For all these reasons, then, bees are in
Neptune’s domain.
All internal parasites are Neptunian, because of their hidden and secretive life-styles. Fleas are ruled by
Neptune because of their habit of concealing themselves in the fur of their hosts. Rats are ruled by
Neptune, as are cockroaches, because most of the time they live in concealment, down in sewers, behind
the baseboards of houses, etc. All animals living in sewers, which are ruled by Scorpio, are under
Neptune’s dominion.
Neptune rules hair and fur, and is associated with the Root of the Powers of Fire. Thus He rules
Class Mammalia as a whole, since these animals are covered in fur or hair and are warm-blooded.

*Saturn rules poikilothermic or cold-blooded animals, in general; Uranus rules anything that flies; and
Pluto rules animals that live below ground or in environments too hot or toxic for most forms of life,
such as brine shrimp, toxic tube-worms, bacterial colonies found in the settling-ponds of runoff from
the cooling systems of nuclear reactors, etc.

Finally, Neptune’s traditional dignity, the Sign Pisces, rules large animals and wild animals in
general, and the horse in particular. The Mediterranean peoples whose God was Poseidon were
merchants, and shipped horses from such places as Scythia to markets all over the Mediterranean. So
Neptune, like Athena and Jupiter, rules the horse; He is also the ruler of any large, wild animal.

Ecological domain or process:

Earth’s hydrosphere, collectively, all oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, and other water-systems of this
Planet. He is also Lord of the processes by which virgin water is vented to the Earth’s surface via
volcanoes and similar outlets from the lower crust and mantle of the Planet, captured and bound in rock
from free-standing bodies of water such as oceans and lakes, received on Earth from water-bearing
meteorite and cometary impacts, circulated throughout Gaia via the tissues of living things as they live
and die, are consumed by others organisms, and are otherwise recycled, etc. He rules the tectonic
processes that gives rise to sea-quakes and tsunamis; the ecological processes that give rise to and
maintain grasslands necessary for the sustenance of horses; and marine, riparian, and lacustrian
ecosystems of all kinds.
He rules altruism, and therefore all interactive systems dependent upon altruistic or altruistic-
seeming behavior among the organisms in the system. This would include beehives; partnerships
between pollinating insects and various flowering plants; the scavenging for parasites in the mouths or
on the hides of larger animals by smaller ones, for example, such as is found in coral atolls of tropical
oceans, where sharks come to have their mouths picked clean of parasites by tiny “dentist fish”; etc. He
therefore rules the genetic mechanisms that seem to be associated with altruism and community, e.g., the
diploid-haploid reproductive process found in bees, etc.
In the micro-ecology of the body, He rules all biochemical processes involving water; all tissues,
organs, and other systems that store water within the body; and the organs such as the kidneys which
return waste-water from the body to the general environment.

Legendary orders of being:

Undines, Water-Nymphs, Mermaids, Tritons, Nereids.

The Phorkids, children of Ceto by Phorkys, another Sea-Being, are associated with Key 23. They
include Ladon, Echidne, and the three Gorgons, Stheino, Euryale, and Medusa; the three Graeae; and
the Hesperides.
 Chrysaor and Pegasus, children born of Medusa (an Avatar of Pallas Athena by Poseidon) and
Poseidon, are associated with Key 23 and Neptune.
The beings that are reported to come to Earth in UFOs are associated with Neptune. In some cases,
this is because they are mysterious, deceptive, and confusing. In others, it is because of what contactees
have been ingesting just prior to the contact . . . :P

Foods, drugs, flavors, and perfumes:

For Key 2, Liber 777 gives phosphorus as the mineral drug of Neptune; hashish (and therefore,
presumably, marijuana) for His vegetable drug; and musk for His perfume. For Key 23, it gives
phosphates for His mineral drug, cascara and all purges for His vegetable drug, and myrrh and onycha for
His perfumes.
De Vore gives poisons, liquids, and habit-forming drugs. 186 This implies that Neptune rules all addictive
substances, drinks of any kinds, and foods which are either toxic in their own right, occasionally (such as
the aforementioned fugu-fish) or inevitably (e.g., cyanide), or which tend to promote histological
toxicity, such as white sugar and rancid fats. De Vore also gives all subtle and seductive flavors, and,
presumably, foods with such flavors, or perfumes having odors with similar qualities. 186a To this list
could be added all elusive or illusionary odors and flavors.
While alcoholism is an affliction ruled by Neptune, alcohol itself is primarily a Solar drug, sacred to
the Solar God Dionysos. (This further supports the idea that Sol has an esoteric dignity in Pisces,
Neptune’s diurnal mundane rulership.)
Whereas the psychedelic drugs, which can be used for enlightenment, and are not addictive by
nature, are ruled by Uranus, the addictive drugs are ruled by Neptune, especially the opiates and the other
inducers of dream, sleep, analgesia, and anesthesia. Neptune rules all addictive substances, including
such cultural commonplaces as cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, snuff, and tobacco in any other form;
cocoa; chocolate; coffee*; aspirin**; white sugar, and, by extension, candies and other sweets that are
sweetened with this drug and which one comes to crave for their sweet taste and the endocrine high they
induce from ingestion†; and a host of other substances which are either sold over the counter or can be
obtained legally via prescription and are not commonly thought of as addictive. Toxins such as bufotonin
used to create the infamous zombie drugs of Haiti (for more on which, see above) are Neptunian, since
they undercut the critical faculties and promote Neptunian state such as catatonia and hypnogogia.186b
Homeopathic tinctures of Neptunian substances are excellent Neptunian drugs. Diuretics, including
coffees and teas containing caffeine, which promote the flow of water, are Neptunian. So is water itself.
Neptunian foods include all sea-foods; anything with an elusive or illusory taste; and anything which
strongly affects the endocrine system or its functions, such as white sugar, as well as all foods prepared
from organisms of any kind that are ruled by Neptune.
Specifically, addictive drugs may be assigned to Neptune and His Keys as follows (e.g.):

Cocaine – Qlippoth of Chesed of Chokmah (or of Kaph of Mem)

Coffee – Qlippoth of Hod of Chokmah (Beth of Mem)
Steroids (when taken for the “high” and as part of an addictive syndrome) – Qlippoth of
Geburah of Chokmah (Peh of Mem)

*Not only are coffee and other caffeinated beverages and foods addictive, but their long-term use
produces a symptomology not normally thought of in association with caffeine in our culture. These
symptoms range from growing paranoia, psychomotor seizures, insomnia and sleep other
disturbances of all kinds, depression, and bipolar syndrome to systemic disturbance of endocrine
function, not to mention cancer of the stomach or intestines, all of which are ruled primarily by
Neptune or Neptune in combination with the other Outer Planets. Traditionally, caffeine is ruled by
Mercury, but this is because of the “speedy” state of mind it can induce. In fact, that “speediness” is
ephemeral, and chronic use of caffeinated products such as coffee impairs coordination and reflexes,
ruled by Mercury. Even longer use can induce seizures, altered states of conscious, and paranoia,
classic Neptunian symptoms. Clearly long-term use of the drug opposes the proper functioning of
Mercury-ruled systems of body and mind, just as the Signs ruled by Neptune oppose those ruled by
Mercury. The apparent Mercurial “high” induced by caffeine is an illusion – and Neptune, the Great
Deceiver, Lord of the Lie, rules illusions of all kinds. The Neptunian nature of the most fundamental
effects of caffeine on the body is subtle in its manifestations and expressions – and Neptune rules
 subtlety, craft, and guile in all forms. So caffeine in all its manifestations is primarily ruled by
Neptune, and only secondarily – if at all – by Mercury.

**Aspirin can be a viciously addictive drug. It can also produce bizarre altered states of consciousness
when taken in large quantities over long periods of time, states that approach or attain the mystical
and the visionary – and Neptune rules the Mystic, the Visionary, the Prophet. It is first cousin to
LSD, chemically speaking, with a chemical structure very similar to that of the latter, an
hallucinogen/psychedelic masquerading as a quotidian over-the-counter analgesic – and Neptune
rules the Mimic and the Masque, as well as being a secondary ruler of psychedelics (because of the
cosmic beauty they reveal to users). Its analgesic mechanism is still not clearly understood – and
Neptune rules mystery. Modern forms of aspirin are derived from coal-tar rather than willow-bark,
which was the original source of the drug – and Neptune rules petroleum and its by-products. Thus
aspirin, like caffeine, comes under the primary jurisdiction of Neptune on a variety of counts.

†Though it is not commonly realized, white sugar – sucrose – is in fact a drug, a very potent one that
stimulates the central nervous system and the endocrine system, especially the pancreas, temporarily
putting them into overdrive. White sugar is used as a religious sacrament by the Thuggees of India,
especially just prior to violent action, and it is traditionally added to dishes served at religious and
holiday feasts throughout India.

Clothing, Magickal Weapons, and other things, objects, and processes:

For Neptune’s Magickal Powers, Liber 777 gives the Vision of God Face-to-Face and the Vision of
Antinomies for Key 2, and the Accomplishment of the Great Work, Talismans, Crystal-Gazing, “etc.”,
for Key 23. For Magickal Weapons, it gives the Lingam and the Inner Robe of Glory for Key 2; and the
Cup, the Cross of Suffering, and the Wine, for Key 23. For Transcendental Morality, it gives the virtue
of Devotion for Key 2, and the Magickal Power of audere for Key 23.
To the list of Magickal Weapons given for Neptune by Liber 777 might be added the whip, for the
erotic stimulation it confers and its connotations of masochism, a Neptunian vice, and slavery, ruled by
Pisces and Neptune; instruments of torture and execution, from the rack to the stake, for their
associations with martyrdom and injustice, ruled by Neptune;
Here is a list of Magickal Weapons of Neptune in each of the Signs:

Aries – the Seed; the Flamethrower (liquid or fluid Fire, Fire from petroleum products)
Taurus – the Pipe or Conduit
Gemini – the Cistern; the Shadoof; the Pump
Cancer – the Fountain; the (Fisherman’s) Net (associations with St. Peter as well as Christ)
Leo – Napalm; the Phallos (Root of the Power of Fire, the Father)
Virgo – the Net
Libra – the Veil (the Bride of Christ)
Scorpio – the Trident; the Poisoned Dagger or Ring; the Black Dragon of Alchemy; the
Titrator (for triturating chemical compounds and mixtures), an instrument of Alchemy and
Homeopathy; the Flush Toilet (Uranus, Who is exalted in Scorpio, rules technology, so the
flush toilet is associated both with Scorpio and with Neptune, for its use of running water as
a primary mechanism of its action)
Sagittarius – Fireworks; the Horse-Collar; the Stake (for execution by fire, i.e., burning at the
stake, especially as a religious devotion or auto da fe); the Pipe (to conduct water, part of
an irrigation system); the Pipe or Bhong (to smoke a toke of Shiva’s and “Bob”’s preferred
Unspeakable Herb, or for use for smoking opium)
Capricorn – the Dam; the Water-Clock; the Rack, the Boot, the Strappado, and other
instruments of political torture
Aquarius – the Nuclear Submarine
Pisces – the Chalice; the Whip; the Cross

Goldstein-Jacobson gives transparent fabrics, nets, and veils for Neptune, along with imitation and
synthetic materials, and therefore, presumably, clothing made of these; prosthetic appliances such as
glass eyes, dentures, toupees, and artificial limbs; plastics and things made of plastic; crystal balls;
films, film negatives, photographic supplies, and cameras. 187
De Vore gives mysterious and unidentifiable substances of all kinds; democratic and popular
movements, mobs, and the common people (reflecting Neptune’s diurnal exaltation in Aquarius);
mystics, dreamers, psychics, visionaries, and mediums, and therefore, by implication, the subjects of their
gifts; hospitals and charities; socialized medicine and hospitals; seditions; socialism; and widespread
unrest. 190
As for clothing, since Neptune rules the acting and cinematic professions, costumes of all kinds are ruled
primarily by Neptune, by definition.

Anatomy and physiology:

Liber 777 gives “the organs of nutrition” for Key 23, for reasons that are not clarified (typical for
Neptune!).
Oken gives the pineal gland, and “all parts of the nervous system which are receptive to psychic
impressions.” He asserts that “Neptune is also influential in the functioning of the chakras (the psychic
centers of bodily energy) and the human aura.” 191 The pineal gland secrets serotonin, which is involved
in psychedelic experiences, trances, and dreams. It is a chemical analog of both LSD and aspirin, the
latter being a pain-killer and antipyretic, reflecting Neptune’s rulership of analgesics as well as of water
in any form, including cool liquid water to put out fires and cool down heated surfaces. Traditionally,
this gland has long been known as “the Seat of the Soul.” On both counts, this is an especially
appropriate association for Neptune.
De Vore adds to this the organs of extra-sensory perception, intuitive and psychic receptivity; the
functioning of telepathic, psychic, or occult faculties; and the formation of white blood-cells. 192 In the
case of this last, in mammals, white blood-cells are products of the immune response, manufactured in
the marrow of the bone, which thus functions as part of the immune-system. The immune response and
immune system, being the way in which the body fends off disease organisms and defends itself from
illness, are ruled by Mars. So Neptune’s rulership of white blood-cells once again calls to mind
Crowley’s dictum that “at the heart of Neptune is Mars”!
Ungar and Huber add to these the endocrine system, the feet, the spinal canal, lachrymation
(production of tears, and the tear-ducts), and the toes.193
The notochord, spine, and skeleton are all partly ruled by Neptune, since all of these first came into
existence among marine organisms, which spent the first 140 million years or so of their existence – one-
fourth of their evolutionary history – in the oceans.* Further, the spine, like the brain, requires salts of
calcium as an absolute necessity for its functioning, while the skeleton must have this element for its
growth and maintenance. Such salts have their origin in the world’s oceans.
Neptune’s domain includes numerous parts of the vertebrate central nervous system and its
functioning, including some organs and faculties that are apparently unique to the hominidae, including
Homo sapiens.
Dreams and dreaming, which have their physiological throne in the corpus coerleus, part of the brain
stem, are Neptunian functions; therefore the corpus coerleus itself is also ruled by Neptune.
The reticular activating system, an extremely important system in the brain stem, which responds to
addictive stimulants such as methedrine and caffeine as super-stimuli, is ruled in part by Neptune.
The thalamus and the corpus callosum, which serve as neurological “bridges” between the two
hemispheres of the human brain, are ruled by Neptune, since they synthesize or synergize (Piscean
functions) emotion with intellect, spatial or mathematical perceptions with verbalization, and dream with
thought. The asymmetry of function between the two hemispheres of the brain, such that one hemisphere
concerns itself with logic, spoken language, and social skills while the other is concerned with spatial
perception, esthetic creativity, and, possibly, the cortical faculties involved in ESP, may be unique to our
species which is, for a variety of reasons, ruled by Neptune, as we have previously seen. The
asymmetrical development of the cerebrum into dominant and sub-dominant hemispheres, with the
corresponding development of right- or left-handedness, etc., is common among mammalian species in
general and, possibly, among other vertebrates, but so far we have found no other species besides
ourselves with the particular type of division of cerebral functions between the two cerebral hemispheres
that is characteristic of human beings.
The cerebellum, riding on the rear of the brain like the Old Man of the Sea, in which resides
practical memory (i.e., the memory of learned skills, as opposed to memories of experience), is
traditionally ruled by Pisces and therefore by Neptune, ruler of that Sign, just as memory in general is
ruled by Luna, a lower octave of Neptune.
The parasympathetic nervous system, which calms excitation and renders the organism relaxed and
receptive to external impressions, is under Neptune’s rule.
Finally, the forebrain, the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, is ruled by Neptune. This part of the
brain, the physical throne of the superego, often puts the mind at the mercy of the collective
consciousness or of unreasonable or cruel social or parental demands, making the person a victim and
martyr (a Neptunian affliction) of pathological social and psychic functioning.

**The earliest possible candidates for the ancestors of the vertebrates were found in the Burgess Shale, a
rock unit about 200 ft (60 m) long and at most 8 ft (2.5 m) thick that crops out on the flank of Mt.
Stephen in British Columbia. This formation dates from the mid-Cambrian of about 520 million
years ago, and was discovered in 1909 by the then dean of American Cambrian paleontology,
Charles Doolittle Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Reopening of Walcott’s Burgess
Shale Quarry in the late 1960s provoked a re-examination of Walcott’s collection. Among other
animals either found for the first time in the rock of the formation or among Walcott’s original
collection and re-classified at this time was a little wormlike beast, Pikaia, a swimming organism
about 2 in (5 cm) long. The V-shaped bundles of muscles along its flanks are structures known only
among chordates, our own phylum. A dense mass reaching back from its head along the top of its
body could be a notochord supporting the dorsal nerve column, something else unique to chordates.
Pikaia seems to be a cephalochordate, related to living lancelets, though that identification is not
certain. After this promising start, it took perhaps another 140 million years for vertebrate life to
make its way out onto dry land, in the form of the first amphibians. For more on this and related
subjects, see The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of Life on Earth (Stephen Jay Gould, general
editor. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), pp. 51-58, and Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale
and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989),
passim.

Psychology:

Neptunian traits and behavioral tendencies include modish and the faddish character traits, i.e, those
deliberately assumed, as an act or pose; illusory, elusive, and intangible emotions that are poorly
understood even by those who experience them; acts dictated by powerful but inexplicable drives and
motives, directed toward invisible, intangible ends; strong sensitivity to harmony, sympathy, symmetry,
rhythm, poetry, the dance, and beauty in any form, and extreme revulsion at their opposites; a love of
music, particularly that produced by stringed instruments; attraction to the morbid and the erotic,
sometimes bordering on necrophilia or masochism; social unrest; a tendency to get swept up in mob
emotions or mass trends; whim and whimsicality; a tendency to renege on a bargain or contract or go
back on one’s word at the merest whim; chronic sadness or grief, often concealed by laughter and
mockery, particularly self-mockery; tendencies toward self-effacement or self-destruction; a tendency to
be overwhelmed by emotion, to react with extreme emotion to things to which such strong emotion may
not be wholly appropriate; artistic, poetic, mystical, or psychic vision; and seductiveness.
Examples of Neptunian personality structures include the extremely psychic, especially those whose
extreme sensitivity therefore makes them so vulnerable to the moods, emotions, and spiritual states of
others that as a result, they are in danger of contracting psychosis; the person who chronically entertains
false hopes and indulges him- or herself in tricky schemes, yet is extremely sympathetic to others (a la
Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man); whimsical persons; the mystic; the poet; the artist; the
institutionalized person, who can no longer function outside the institution in which he or she has been
long confined; the chronically psychotic; the mesmerist; the other-worldly temperament.
Neptunian faculties include feeling, desire, emotions of all kinds, extreme charisma of the sort found
in the world’s movers and shakers, imagination, esthetic sensitivity and talent, psychic faculties and
many forms or aspects of extra-sensory perception. When thwarted or too greatly stressed, the native
strongly tends to become psychoneurotic or even psychotic, melodramatic and histrionic, and susceptible
to flattery, the power of suggestion, and mere appearances of things. Such a person is often very
conformistic, but may succeed in enterprises requiring great intelligence, originality, and mental
persistence for their accomplishment.
 Neptune’s virtues include devotion (see Col. L of Liber 777) and faith or devotional belief. The
latter comes from Neptune’s rulership of Pisces, the fourth House of the natural Zodiacal Wheel from
Sagittarius, which is the Sign of Higher Knowledge. Counting counter-clockwise around the Wheel, the
fourth from a given House (counting that House as the first in the sequence) rules the outcome of the
affairs of that House. Since belief or faith, ruled by Pisces, is the outcome of higher knowledge,
Neptune, ruler of Pisces, includes faith and belief among His virtues. His greatest virtue is of course
Wisdom, since this is the meaning as well as the name of His Sephirah, Chokmah.

Diseases:

Liber 777 gives Insanity for Key 2, and “chill” for Key 23.
De Vore gives anoxia or oxygen deficiency; glandular imbalances due to unknown causes; energy
depletion and wasting diseases; anemia; neuroses; catalepsy, “often the result of undirected or
undisciplined psychic activity”; hypochondria; and drug addiction.194
Goldstein-Jacobson gives wasting diseases, abnormal conditions of all kinds, baffling symptoms that
are hard to diagnose and may be groundless; coma, fainting, suffocation, or choking; stupefaction,
torpor, and unconsciousness caused by drugs, anesthetics, etc.; hysteria; suicidal tendencies; and danger
from miscarriages, abortions, and blood-poisoning, or “from a collection of pus,” according to the Sign of
Neptune’s placement. She says that in charts erected for surgeries, Neptune shows, by His closest aspect,
the type of anesthetic that is used. 195
Typically Neptunian pathologies include amnesia; mystification concerning the real motives of
others, a symptom frequently associated with severe psychoneurosis or psychosis; catatonia; hypnogogic
stupors; poisoning from any source, including septicemia; masochism*; passive-aggressive behavior
syndromes; the biochemical psychoses, such as schizophrenia and paranoid schizophrenia**; imaginary,
psychosomatic, and psychogenic illnesses†; nightmares and pavor nocturnes (“night-terrors” or “night-
horrors”); pathological, compulsive lying; sleep apnia and other sleep pathologies; any unconscious
compulsive or obsessive syndrome; passive-aggressive behavior syndromes; pathological lying;
alcoholism, drug addiction, and all other forms of substance abuse; necrophilia; and confusion of all
kinds.
In particular, Neptune rules migraines, because these can be set off by coffee, a drug of Neptune, and
smog, the by-product of burning of petrochemicals (ruled by Neptune); and diabetes that is caused or
exacerbated by ingestion of white sugar, another drug of Neptune.

*Sadism, the complement of this psychosexual behavior syndrome, is ruled by Pluto.

**Schizophrenia is not the same as schizoid, dissociate or multiple-personality syndrome, which is ruled
by Uranus. Schizophrenia is associated with the “fragmented” or “shattered” personality rather than
the “sub-divided” one of MPS. The term “schizophrenia” refers to a splitting off from reality itself
of the whole person, rather than a splitting apart into coherent sections of the personality, as is the
case in MPS. The personality completely loses focus, and in consequence the person functions
erratically and badly, with problems making appropriate associations between external reality and
internal, psychic events or acting thereon. In paranoid schizophrenia, the schizophrenic regains a
focus, but it is an inappropriate or pathological one. The cost of that focus is that the person slowly
becomes a social pariah and misfit, suspecting everyone and unable to establish satisfactory and
fulfilling social and sexual relationships with others, due to the nature of the focus itself, which is
based upon a perception or misperception of persecution by individuals or a conspiracy for reasons
that are nebulous, unprovable, and often completely crazy, frequently combined with delusions of
grandeur.

†The latter are also ruled by Uranus, because they arise as a result of very real Magick applied
accidentally and unconsciously or otherwise to the sufferer’s body by self or others.

One of the most insidious of the Neptunian psychosocial pathologies is recreational woman- and
child-abuse, particularly that involving psychological assaults and terrorism perpetrated upon the victim
in order to keep the latter in a state of mystification concerning the reason reasons for the abuse or the
fact that the perpetrator benefits from it in any way. In terms of both their natal charts and their general
development, both abuser and abused will exhibit various Neptunian character traits or aspects of
personality structure, and the relationship between them itself is a Neptunian pathology.*

*However, the idea that the victim has somehow agreed to being victmized by the perpetrator is itself a
Neptunian sociopsychopathology, one popularly known as “blaming the victim.” Almost invariably,
in these Neptunian patterns of abuse, the victim has no real power over the situation and no way to
bring the abuse to a halt, whereas the perpetrator has nearly total power over the victim – and, all too
often, the tacit approval of society concerning the abuse. The behavior of the perpetrator has many
Plutonian, Uranian, and Saturnian aspects, whereas the victim-status of the target of the abuse is
purely Neptunian in nature. Neptune rules martyrdom, sacrifice, and related matters, and it is as if
the victim had been chosen not only by the perpetrator but even by society itself to be a sacrifice to
some dark Gods of urban power and wealth. This is done in exactly the same way that in many
“primitive” and earlier cultures, as recorded in myths and folk-tales that have since come down to us,
communities would sacrifice tribute maidens and youths to dragons or ogres – wild ravening beasts
or predatory human beings – that were ravaging and terrorizing the neighboring countryside, to buy
them off, or even gain favors from them that would benefit the community as a whole. These tribute
maidens and youths had to be the best the community had to offer, perfect in body and soul, innocent
and beautiful, or the dragon or ogre or whatever would reject them and continue its predations or not
grant the desired favors. Likewise, innocent children and women are often battered to death in body,
soul, and spirit over a long period of time by some monster of a parent or guardian or spouse while
the entire neighborhood, the families of both abused and abuser, even the court-system, though they
could hardly not be aware of what is happening, act as if they were completely oblivious to it. Once
the victim is either dead or in the critical ward in the hospital, suddenly everyone seems to wake up
out of a trance and immediately make haste to arrest and punish the perpetrator. Up until then,
however, it’s, “Oh, she brings it on herself!”, or, “Of course they aren’t mistreating him – he’s just
accident-prone!” right up until the victim is dying or dead. Whatever arcane benefit society gets out
of this, it perpetuates this evil charade as long as possible by using such ploys as the “blame the
victim” technique, not because the victims truly are to blame, but rather because this soothes the
consciences of those who must allow this sort of horror to go on because the alternative is perceived
as worse, whether it truly is or not.

Finally, the specific vice of Neptune is idolatry. This failing is of course a specific violation of
Judeo-Christian law, as recorded in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. In more basic, non-pejorative terms not
peculiar to any one culture or sociological milieu, however, idolatry is the result of a confusion of
psychospiritual map – the thing idolized – with esoteric territory, the Being or aspect of divinity rep-
resented by that idol. For example, the dysfunctions known as miserliness, venality, cupidity, greed, and
acquisitiveness, all variations of extremes of inappropriate hoarding behavior, are the result of confusion
of particular manifestations or results of prosperity – itself an understandably desirable thing to exper-
ience – with that prosperity itself. The insecure, frightened, sick old man or woman who lives in
destitution in filthy, unfurnished, unheated quarters, with inadequate clean water, food, and medicine,
with only rags for clothing – but with hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in coins,
greenbacks, treasury bills, securities, bonds, uncashed checks, and other negotiable assets stuffed into the
old, smelly mattress of his or her bed – is an archetype of this sort. In such a case, this sort of confusion
of spiritual ends with manifest means takes the form of clinging to the particular representations of
prosperity with such autistically narrow-focused intensity that the actual process of prosperity is entirely
forsaken. As a result, in the midst of a potential plenty, or at least the instruments which, properly
managed, could be used to secure it, one is sunken into the most terrible, soul-destroying poverty and
fear. In the general case, by falling into the vice of idolatry, the Magickal analogue of which is lust of
result, one becomes so enamored of either of the means of securing a healthy state of being or its results
that, in trying to gain it or hold on to its manifest and particular instances, once loses the greater good –
the ongoing, desirable condition – itself, perhaps permanently.

Occupations and ecological niches:

 Davis tells us that Neptune rules bootleggers, kidnappers, musical composers, photographers,
caricaturists, speculators, diplomats, politicians, psychic mediums, the oil and fishing industries,
hospitals, and all charitable institutions and trusts.196
De Vore gives “those concerned with the investigation of scientific or metaphysical secrets”;
geniuses, prophets, and spiritual counselors; those engaged in “water pursuits” [water-sports?
occupations having to do with water, such as fishing]; artistic and literary geniuses; philosophers;
occultists; occupations concerned with water or lipids. 197 He adds to these, as general categories, pro-
foundly wise and eccentric individuals; persons of mysterious origin; and seditionists.198
Additionally, Neptune rules entertainers of all kinds. In particular, He rules comedians; actors and
actresses, especially those in pornographic productions; the cinema and the theater; illusionists and
prestidigitators (stage magicians); make-up artists; dancers in general and ballet dancers in particular;
and graphic and musical artists of all kinds.
He rules gamblers and all those involved in gambling in any way, including owners and managers of
casinos, croupiers and dealers, those who service gambling machines, etc.
He rules con-artists, embezzlers, and all those who make their living by means of fraud and
chicanery. Likewise He rules blackmailers, since these gain their income by using secrets as weapons.
He rules advertising agents, the advertising industry as a whole, used-car salesmen, and all other types of
snake-oil purveyors.
He rules beauticians and cosmetologists (He shares the rule of this domain with Venus).
He rules morticians, because they are (a) cosmetologists and (b) con-artists.*

*He shares this domain with Saturn and Pluto, Lords of Endings and Death.

He rules martyrs, masochists, all who suffer, and all who mourn.
He rules all those engaged in hidden activities and practices; undercover professions such as those of
undercover police, secret police, and guerrilla soldiers; and ninjas.
He rules cryptology and cryptologists, particularly those who work at putting clear messages into
code, rather than decoding encrypted information.
He rules sailors and mariners in general,* especially submariners.** Likewise, he rules swimmers
and divers. Marine, lacustrian, and riparian ecologists are under His dominion. So are biochemists, since
all Life is based on water and its peculiar biochemical aspects.

*He shares this rulership with Luna, the traditional ruler of such occupations.

**Pluto is the secondary ruler of submariners, especially in the case of those who crew or command
nuclear submarines. This is because Pluto’s Polynesian avatar is Ta’aroa (Kanaloa), God of Hell and
the Deep Sea.

Alchemists are governed by Neptune, as are homeopathic specialists and researchers, since the
foundation of both these disciplines is the study and manipulation of Water, both as a chemical
compound and as an Elemental property of the universe. So are pharmacists and the pharmaceutical
industry. The pharmaceutical disciplines depend heavily upon the uses of water; they involve the seeking
out of unknown or hidden things, particularly plants and animals hidden in water; and allopathic
pharmaceuticals are based upon substances which are often very poisonous or are potentially addictive in
nature, qualities ruled by Neptune.
Neptune rules hair, and therefore wig-makers and barbers; costume makers and designers; cosmetic
surgeons; and those who make prosthetics or false members of all kinds for cosmetic rather than
prophylactic reasons, such as elevator heels, false breasts or “falsies,” and contact lenses that make the
eye seem to have a different color than its own natural one.
Neptune rules horses, and therefore rules race-tracks, betting-agents and touts, jockeys, veterinarians
who deal with horses, etc. He also rules wild-animals of all kinds, and therefore zoo-keepers, field
ecologists, national park rangers and forest rangers, etc.
 In the same way that hardware producers and experts are ruled by Uranus, software (computer
programs and systems) producers and experts are ruled by Neptune. Neptune rules mathematicians, as
well. Neptune rules those properties of space and time that are extremely subtle, elusive, and hard to
comprehend and understand, and therefore such areas of study as quantum mechanics. He thus also rules
the physical aspects of many or most cryptophenomena, such as UFOs, strange disappearances, etc., in
addition to those that are purely the results of hoaxes, or reports of them due solely to psychosis or
hysteria.
Whereas Uranus is the Magickian, Neptune is the Mystic. It is Uranus’s task to make real and
manifest the unreal and intangible, to manifest imagination in concrete form, to make available to
ordinary people those things heretofore reserved for the Elect, to make the Dream come true; it is
Neptune’s to provide the Dream, the aspiration, the imagination, the hints of things unknown for Uranus
so that the latter can bring them into quotidian manifestation. Uranus is the Scholar, Engineer,
Technician, and Scientist; Neptune is the Artist, Poet, Mathematician, and Mystic. When Uranus has
solved all the problems, it is Neptune’s task to bring new problems and new questions into consciousness
so that Uranus may forever have new work on hand to do.

Places, nations, and peoples:

Goldstein-Jacobson tells us that Neptune rules places of retirement, confinement, seclusion, and
enforced solitude, such as penitentiaries, jails, police stations, hospitals, asylums, cells, and barred places,
and that in Neptune-ruled places there is always some form of restraint. She says of Neptune that

There is always something mysterious and hard to explain in a horary question

where Neptune is the significator[; his] influence tends to fool or defraud so that the
querent is misinformed or uninformed about the property or the person inquired about.
It is like a face seen through a veil, assuming some value that is not really there & leads
the judgment astray. Any real estate will give an effect of greater attractiveness than it
[actually] possesses.
If Neptune rules or is in the house of question, say that the querent must be on his
guard; appearances are deceptive and the matter is not entirely as represented: the
place is not altogether as it seems nor is the thing genuine, and there is a shadow on the
title.199

An example of a Neptune-ruled nation is the island-nation of Barbados, which bears the device of
Neptune’s sigil, the trident, Y on its flag.
Another is Israel, founded on May 14, 1948, at 4 p.m., Tel Aviv Summer Time. In Israel’s natal
chart, Neptune, at 10ø Libra, is exactly rising, and thus has the same type of influence over this modern
nation-state that Uranus has over the United States of America.
In general, all island states and nations are Neptune-ruled, including, e.g., Australia, Pitcairn Island,
the Hawaiian Islands before their annexation by the United States, etc. In the case of the last, the modern
state of Hawaii, now part of the United States of America, is often a way-station for international sales of
narcotics, ruled by Neptune. Its politics has often been of the clandestine sort, all the dirtier and deadlier
for that. And it has been home to a base of the United States Navy ever since the annexation by the USA
of the Hawaiian Islands, the Navy of course also under Neptune’s dominion.
Hollywood, California, A. K. A. “tinsel-town,” is the perfect example of the Neptune-ruled city.
Glamour, glitz, and the arch-phony here rule supreme, the most glamorous mansions are no more than
empty fronts and facades to fool the camera; and both booze and drugs have always flowed freely here.
(Ronald Reagan, our 40th President, was originally a Hollywood B-actor – and by now it is quite clear
that both he and his vice-president, George Herbert Bush, gave the orders and approved the actions
involved in Iran-Contra, to the success of which narcotic drugs, especially cocaine, in egregiously large
quantities in exchange for modern high-tech weaponry were crucial. Neptune rules narcotics; here again
is His pervasive influence over Hollywood made manifest, in strange, indirect, subtle ways typical of
Neptune.)
The Northern Quarter of the Circle and the Altar is ruled by Neptune. Traditionally, during
Magickal evocations, it is from this Quarter that evil spirits and demons are believed to come, and in
which the Triangle of Art is placed when evocation of a demon or other entity with something of an
attitude is to take place. Non-malignant entities may come from this Quarter, as well, but the traditional
association between North and evil or malignant influence is very strong in the Western Ceremonial
tradition. Here, Neptune represents pathologies of those Saturnian functions expressed as concealed evil
and malice, seductive and subtle evil, the lower Astral realm, and so on.
All oceans, seas, great lakes, and mighty rivers are ruled by Neptune, Who rules Water in general
and all particular expressions of it.
Discordians, Erisians, SubGenii, practitioners of Bujinkan ninpo or tai chi, Taoists, and Christians
are examples of Neptune-ruled or -associated religious groups and communities.
All Polynesian peoples and nations are Neptunian, because their ancestors were at home at least as
much on the waters of the Pacific Ocean as mother other peoples are on the land.

Planetary Age of Man:

By the reckoning that an ideal life-span is 120 years long, and that each Planet rules a decade of life,
Neptune rules the Ninth age, that spanning ages 81-90.
Neptune rules those parts of the life that are lived outside space and time: dream-sleep; hypnotic
and hypnogogic states and trances of all kinds; psychic states; visions induced by the use of drugs, by
pain or by fasting, or by hypnosis, whether performed by oneself or another; artistic and scientific or
mathematical inspiration; and gestation, the time when the mammalian fetus forms and develops into an
organism which ultimately can live out of water, breathing air.

Matters of the horoscope:

In general, these include the following: Abandoned persons or things, abandonment, orphans;
abdications; abnormalities of all kinds, abnormal behavior; absent-mindedness; accomplices; acting, as
a profession, actors and actresses; addicts, alcohol (potable), alcoholism, ale, beer, booze, bourbon,
cocaine, crack (cocaine), crank (methamphetamine), drug addictions, drugs, drunkenness, drunks,
ethanol, Habafropzipulops (or ‘frop, the Sacred Herb of the Church of the SubGenius), hashish, hemp
(marijuana), liquor, narcosis, narcotics, opiates, vodka, whiskey; alchemy; aliases; altruism; ambigui-
ty; ambivalence; anchorites, eremites, hermits, recluses, reclusiveness, retreats, solitude; amnesia,
fugue; amnion, amniotic fluid, caul, uterus, womb; analgesia, anesthesia, anesthetics; annulments;
anonymity; anonymous letters; antiseptics (these are invariably poisons of one sort or another, and are
used in association with infections by micro-organisms, ruled by Neptune); artificial feet; the arts (fine),
artists, painters, sculptors; ascetics; assassins; astral entities; asylums; bacteria, bacteriologists, bac-
teriology; bafflement, confusion, confoundment; bars, bartenders, taverners, taverns; beaches; betrayal;
bigamists, bigamy; bisexuality; black holes (the inside of); blackmail; bliss, ecstacy, fascination,
rapture; blurriness, blurs, dimness, fuzziness; bondage and dominance, masochism; brewing (as beer),
distilling (as alcohol); boats, sailors, ships, submariners, submarines; cameras, cinema, film, movies,
photographs, photography; caprice, capriciousness; character defects; charitable institutions, charities,
charity given and received; cheating; chemicals, chemistry; chrysalis, cocoon, pupa; clairvoyance;
clandestine matters and affairs, clandestine relationships, clandestine work; cloudiness, clouds; clowns,
clowning, lampoon, mockery, satire; codes, cryptologists, cryptology; commingledness, commingling;
communion; community (as a collective phenomenon); compassion, concern for others; computer
software (the hardware is ruled by Uranus); concealed conditions, people, or things, concealment;
concentration camps; confidences, confidential matters; confusion, mystification; con-games, con-
artists; conspiracies; contrition, repentance; crime; cruelty, sadism, schadenfreude; crying, grief,
mourning, weeping; cryptophenomenology (the study of irreproducible and cryptic phenomena, such as
UFOs, Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.)*; damnation, defeat, deprivation, loss, perdition; dancing; day-dreaming;
deception; °radiation, whether biochemical, chemical, ecological, economic, moral, thermodynamic, or
any other; delays; delusion; detention; disinformation; displaced, homeless, or exiled persons;
dissolution, both physical and psychospiritual; dreamers, dreaminess, dreams; drowning, embezzlement,
fraud; emotional illness, emotional instability, emotional problems, hysteria; enchantment, hypnosis,
fascination, trance; engulfment; enigmas, enigmatic things or people, mysteries, mysterious things or
places, mystery, quandaries; errors in judgment; escapism; esthetic sensitivity, esthetic talent; E.S.P.;
evasion, evasiveness; exile; failure; faith; false appearances, falsity; fantasy; feet; fish, fishermen;
flooding; fluidity, fluids, liquids; fog, mist, precipitation, rain; forced conformity; forgetfulness;
frustration, hindrances; fur, hair; fusion; fuzziness; gas, gases, gas-lines; ghettos; glamour; gossip,
gossips, rumors, rumor-mongers; guerrilla soldiers, guerrilla warfare; hallucinations, psychoses (chronic
and seductive, as opposed to the painful, sudden, and catastrophic episodes or syndromes of violent
psychosis which are ruled by Uranus); haze, smog, smoke; hidden agendas; homeopathy; hospitals;
hot-tubs; hugeness, vastness (as opposed to mere largeness, ruled by Jupiter); hypersensitivity; ideals,
idealism; illusion; imagination, imaginative ability; impotence; impractical ideas; incurable illnesses;
infectious substances, used medical sharps; infidelity; insatiability; inspiration; insubstantialness;
interpenetration; intrigues; intuition; junk; kidnapping; lakes, oceans, rivers, seas; leaks (of liquids or
gases); liars, lies, lying; limitations, limiting conditions; martyrdom, martyrs; masquerade;
mathematics, higher; medicines, pharmaceuticals, pharmacists, pharmacologists; meditation, meditation
rooms, meditators; mental health workers; mental illness; misfortune; misinformation;
misrepresentation; monasteries, monks; music, musicians; mysticism, mystics; myth, story; naviga-
tion, navigators; navies; nebulae (astronomy); nebulousness; nervousness; nervous breakdowns;
neuroses, obsessions, psychoneurosis; ninjas, ninpo, Bujinkan ninpo; nursing homes; occult abilities;
occupations involving unreality; oil, oil-lease investments, oil wells; orphans; Out-of-the-Body
Experiences (OOBEs); pain (chronic); paranoia; the past; past mistakes; patience; patients (n., those
passively or unwillingly suffering the attentions of others, particularly medical, psychological, interroga-
tional, or just plain sadistic); peace, quietude; penal institutions, prisons; perfumes; perversions;
perversity; petroleum; philanthropy, philanthropic organizations; philosophers; phobias (co-ruled with
Uranus); pipe-dreams; plots, schemes; plumbing problems (e.g., leaks); poetry, poets; poisons,
toxicity, toxins, venomousness, venoms; pollution of the environment; prisoner-of-war camps;
problems, personal; psychic ability. psychic senses, psychic phenomena, psychics; psychoses; pupils
(students); puzzles, riddles (recreations); quantum mechanics; religious sects; renunciates, re-
nunciation, sacrifice (the verb), sacrifices (the noun); research; restraint, restraints; retirement from
work; retirement, places of; romanticism, romantics; saboteurs, spies; scandals; screens, veils;
séances; seclusion; secret burdens, matters, problems, sorrows, or worries; secrets; secret police;
sedatives; seducers, seduction, seductiveness; self-deception, self-destruction, self-undoing; self-
lessness, selfless giving, selfless service; self-sacrifice; septic tanks;** shipping; shrouds; sins of
commission and omission; skeletons in the closet; sleep; sneaking, sneaks; the spirit; spiritism, spirits,
spiritualism; spiritual attunement, spirituality;† stained glass; strip-tease artists; submergence;
substitutes; subversion; suffocation; suicide; surrealism; surrender; swimming pool; sympathy;
synthetics; traitors, treachery, treason, treasonous acts; trance; ulterior motives; the Unconscious,
especially the Collective Unconscious; undercover agents, undercover work; undoing; undulations,
waves; unrealism; unreality; vagueness; vandals; vigils; vision (artistic, psychic, or prophetic, not the
physical sense); vision, defects of; virtual reality (the software, and the psychospiritual and esthetic
considerations associated with it); wanderlust; wasting diseases; water; water-damage; water-tanks,
wave mechanics; welfare programs; widowers, widowhood, widows; widow-makers (slang for anything
deadly); wisdom; withdrawal into fantasy; writers.
Notice how many of items in the preceding list also come under Saturn’s traditional dominion.
Neptune represents those pathological aspects of Saturnian influence that have to do with secret
treacheries and violence, hidden and forbidden pleasures, bondage, retreat from the world, and the
maximization of entropy.

*The work of Jacques Vallee and other cryptophenomenologists report the following Neptunian aspects
of the UFO phenomenon and everything connected with it: (1) Confusion in reports of their
appearance and behavior; (2) frequently, equal confusion in the states of mind of those making the
reports, sometimes followed by psychotic episodes in people who have experienced UFO contact
(this, mind you, in cases in which it is obvious to the most skeptical hard scientist that something
real, objective, and physical has taken place, regardless of the stability of the mind and emotions of
those making reports about it); (3) the many baffling aspects of the phenomenon, which suggest that
our physical sciences are inadequate to explain it, and that our views of physical reality need drastic
revision; (4) the con-artists who cash in on fanatical belief in UFO “Gods” by so many people.
Obviously, UFOs are also ruled by Uranus, because many are reported as “objects in the sky.” But
not all of them come from the sky; some are, in fact, of marine origin. In addition, the typical
reports of the behavior and occasional occupants of the things in so many cases match those from the
Middle Ages and earlier of such things as the Faery-Folk, elves, trolls, goblins, fox-fire, and many
other things which no one then associated with high-energy technology, as we do now – and which
generally were not reported to come from the sky. So while Uranus rules some aspects of some
cases of the phenomenon – i.e., those which seem to come from the sky, and/or which appear to
involve high-energy technology, both of which are Uranian – its general nature, involving enormous
confusion, mysterious apparent violations of physical laws, exploitation of the gullible by clever con-
 artists, and so on, are all Neptunian by nature. This is so of reports of UFO-like phenomena going
back into the mists of time, as transmitted to us via oral folklore traditions from countless cultures
and ages. Therefore Neptune is the primary ruler of UFOs, and Pisces is the Sign associated with
them.

**Neptune is the diurnal esoteric ruler of Scorpio, which rules sewers, septic processes, etc.

†Neptune is associated with Sephirah 2, Chokmah, the Father, Root of the Power of Fire, and thus with
Spirit. But Spirit is Will and Intention, ruled by Pluto, Who is the nocturnal mundane Lord of
Scorpio, of which Neptune is diurnal esoteric Lord.

Watters tells us that Neptune signifies the principle of diffusion. She says:

Neptune is the most difficult of all the planets to understand because its mode of
operation is so subtle and frequently so slow as to be imperceptible on the material and
rational planes where human judgment is formed. Abstractly, Neptune is the
astrological equivalent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in physics: that is, the
principle of entropy. Entropy is the process by which a given amount of energy when
released into the environment gradually becomes diluted or diffused throughout the
entire available area until it appears to be dissolved in its surroundings. The total
amount of energy released remains the same, but as it is diffused through the widest
possible area it merges so completely with its surroundings that it cannot be retrieved in
its original form. Its power becomes so diluted, vitiated, that it loses its original
integrity and turns into something else. . . .201

Therefore “Neptune rules everything associated with the loss of individual identity, with the
dissolution of the ego, with the merging of the individual thing or person into an amorphous collection or
collective.” 202 Because of this, Neptune co-rules Communism (the primary ruler of which is Uranus);
gooey things such as putty, taffy, and tar; homogenized milk and other erstwhile heterogeneous
mixtures; junk, “where the original integrity of things is lost through breakage, wear and tear,
dissolution”; self-sacrifice; Christianity; slavery and slaves; impotence, whether physical, mental,
psychospiritual, social, or political; dreams; images, mirages, and hallucinations; photography, motion
pictures, the picture on television, the public image, propaganda, and many types of fraud; deception;
poisons, drugs, and alcohol; welfare and charities, and the groups that dispense it; orphans and
orphanages; illegitimate children; skeletons in the closet; embezzlement; and bankruptcy. She tells us
that on the material or constructive side, Neptune rules the ocean, hence ships, navies and sailors;
hospitals; chemistry and chemists; gas and oil; fish, fishermen, and fishmongers; the ballet and ballet
dancers; poets, painters, and musicians; the endocrine glands and the biochemistry of the body; and
“the wealth of the sea.” 203

Music:

Music ruled by Neptune includes, e.g., Muzak and other forms of “elevator music”; popular music
designed to soothe or entrance; and “New Age” music, such as the works of Stephen Halpern. (Music in
these genres are especially useful for putting people in states of relaxation, total acceptance,
unquestioning credulousness, etc. so that it is, as a result, much easier to sell them things they don’t want
and don’t need, or otherwise con them out of their money and worldly goods. See references to con-
artists, frauds, etc., above.)
Since Neptune rules the fine arts, including music, the music associated with Neptune includes all
classical and elegant works.
Individual works might include, e.g., the works of Philip Glass, a modern electronic musician whose
works are hauntingly beautiful; sea-chanteys of all kinds; Claude Debussy’s impressionistic
masterpiece, La Mer (1903-1905); “Sweet and Low,” a lullaby by Alfred Tennyson; “Aloha Oe,” the
national/state anthem of Hawaii; “The Exodus Song,” by Pat Boone, theme music from the movie
Exodus (the modern state of Israel, with which this movie is concerned, is ruled by Neptune in the same
way that the United States of America is by Uranus); “Hatikva,” the national anthem of Israel;
“Summertime,” by George Gershwin and Du Bose Hayward, from Porgy and Bess; “Old Man River,”
Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, for Showboat; all Christian songs and hymns; and the U. S.
Marine Corps Hymn.
The apocryphal piece “Blue Monday,” the playing of which on the radio in various Eastern Bloc
countries was reported to generates waves of suicides, is ruled by Neptune.
The score for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! is associated with Neptune, because
of Oklahoma’s history: the martyred land, filled with peoples in exile (the Cherokee Nation, etc.), the
Dust Bowl (martyrdom of the ecological system of the land), and the tremendous amount of sub-surface
wealth it contains in the form of oil.
See Chapter 10 of Part 3 of the Appendices in Volume 1 for lyrics to various Neptunian musical
pieces.

Poetry:

These include, e.g., hymns and chants to the Polynesian Gods Ta’aroa (Kanaloa) and Tane (Kane);
“Danny Deever,” by Rudyard Kipling.

Graphic arts:

The works of Salvador Dali, Monet, and other surrealists are all ruled by Neptune, and co-ruled by
Uranus.
All cinematic productions of any kind are ruled by Neptune, by definition. Specifically, such
productions as The Robe (on the life of Jesus of Nazareth),

Books and other literary productions:

Robert A. Heinlein, “They,” Unknown Worlds, 1941: A story of the quintessential paranoid
delusion. – Or is it?
Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters (New York: Ballantine Books, 1951,1990). Ditto. Cubed.
Herman Melville (1819-1891), The Confidence Man (185?): A discourse by a con-artist.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851): The archetypal novel of the Ocean-Sea and all in it –
including men.
Georg Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Philip E. B.
Jourdain, translator. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955): This work, on the mathematics of the
infinite, forever changed mathematics, opening it up to the development of ideas that in the past had been
strongly resisted. See below, concerning its author.
Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C (New York:
John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1994): Detailed discussion of the ways in which programmers can use
cryptography to maintain the privacy of computer data. Includes discussion of PGP – if you gotta ask,
you can’t afford it . . .
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939): The stunning, Pulitzer-
winning novel of the tragedy of the American Dust Bowl and its immediate victims, in particular the
“Okies,” made exiles and paupers because of man-made ecological disaster on a then-inconceivable
scale.
Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil (Chicago: Regnery Press, 1973): The horrifying true-life account of a
woman with at least 16 separate personalities as a result of a long series of ghastly assaults inflicted on
her when she was a toddler by her own mother.
Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls (New York: Jove Books, 1987). An autobiographical case-
history of a woman who was so horribly traumatized throughout her early years by a sociopathic step-
parent that she developed at least 92 separate, distinct personalities – who, in fact, collectively comprise
the real author of this fascinating book. More horrifying than Sybil. Raises the interesting assertion that
like the author(s), in general people who suffer from multiple personality syndrome (MPD) also tend
strongly to manifest such paranormal abilities as poltergeist and other psychokinetic phenomena,
projective as well as receptive telepathy, and many others.
Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (New York: Grove Press,
1964). While this delightfully satirical but simplistic view of human sociopsychology does provide a few
useful insights about the dynamics of interrelationships, it does not address the fundamental realities of
the lives of many of us, such as pain, oppression, illness, death, poverty, etc. A textbook on human
psychology for those who live in strictly in the Summerland, where all is always wonderful and those
tiresome intrusions, such as hunger, thirst, need to void one’s bladder, child- or woman-abuse, burglary,
murder, political corruption, etc. never intrude and one always has everything completely under one’s
control. Not recommended for the realistic – except maybe as a way to get the drop on otherwise
successful con-artists who study this book as a way of improving their techniques.
Claude M. Steiner, Games Alcoholics Play (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984): Ditto – mit
schnapps. Or whatever your poison happens to be. (See discussion on the XVIII-th amendment to the
Constitution of the United States of America, above.)
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and
Co., Inc., 1970): The shark is an ancient animal, yet highly evolved, with a form of intelligence as
powerful as any mammal’s, but so different from ours as to seem as if it belonged to another planet. This
splendid animal inhabits the great deeps of the ocean, and with its formidable powers and fearsome
reputation is clearly one of Neptune’s own.
N. Scott Peck, Children of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1983): If Saturn represents Evil in all its horrible variety, the Outer Planets represent the three
main forms Evil takes: Uranus is Ahriman, the Destroyer; Pluto is the Murderer; and Neptune is the
Deceiver, Father of the Lie. In this book, Peck presents the vast damage the Lie, the Qlippoth of
Neptune, does to us all, both to those against whom it is used and those who wield it as their weapon.
Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil: Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans (New York:
Reader’s Digest Press/Crowell Distributors, 1976): Five real-life case-studies of souls in bondage to Evil.
Another aspect of Evil represented by Neptune is possession, here closely examined by an outstanding
journalist.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno (from The Divine Comedy): The ultimate portrait of the less-pleasant
features of the Collective Unconscious.
The New Testament: The book of the Aeon of Osiris/Pisces, ruled by Neptune.
The Stark Fist of Removal: The official magazine of the Church of the SubGenius, the world’s first
industrial religion, founded by J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, the martyred Saint of Sales (his forerunner and First
Prophet was Phineas T. Barnum, the Buddha of Bulldada, for more on whom, see below).
The entirety of the Alternative Press, A.K.A. the Marginals Publishing Movement, which is to the
Collective Unconscious what the lyrics of a song are to its melody.
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897): The Vampire is the archetypal symbol of that face of Evil that is
ruled by Neptune – the Seducer, Deceiver, Poisoner, and Soul-Eater. This, the first truly modern
fictional treatment of the Vampire, inspired scores of films (Neptune rules cinema) based upon it, one of
the best of which is Lugosi’s portrayal of the title role in Tod Browning’s 1931 film, Dracula. Other
outstanding works on this theme include: Byron Preiss (editor), The Ultimate Dracula (New York: Dell
Books, 1991 (anthology); Robert R. McCammon (editor and contributor), Under the Fang (New York:
Pocket Books, 1991) (theme anthology); Jeff Gelb and Lonn Friend (editors), Hot Blood: Tales of
Erotic Horror (New York: Pocket Books, 1989) (anthology); Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett (editors),
Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror (New York: Pocket Books, 1991) (anthology); Jeff Gelb
and Michael Garrett, Hottest Blood (New York: Pocket Books, 1993) (anthology); Michele Slung
(editor), I Shudder at Your Touch: 22 Tales of Sex and Horror (New York: ROC Books, 1991)
(anthology); Michele Slung (editor), Shudder Again: 22 Tales of Sex and Horror (New York: ROC
Books, 1993) (anthology); Stephen King, It (New York: Viking Press, 1986); Stephen King, ’Salem’s
Lot (New York: Doubleday, 1975).
Edward Stephens, Blow Negative (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1962): There is also
redemption.

Films:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)

Saints and exemplars:

The aforementioned J. R. “Bob” Dobbs (1929-1984), the martyred “Saint of Sales” of the Church of
the SubGenius (Neptune also rules the apocryphal).
 Phineas T. Barnum (1810-1891), a pioneer of American pedagogy who made the process of
education concerning fraud and con-artistry painless, even pleasant. “Bob” Dobbs may have been the
Saint of Sales, but Barnum was the Buddha of Bulldada, standing more or less in the same relation to
“Bob” that John Brown did to the Fightin’ Jesus.
The Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade (1740-1814), whose pixie-like sense of humor
enraged Popes, outraged civil authority, may or may not have stimulated an untold horde of under-the-
covers-with-the-flashlight adolescent readers to think for themselves, inadvertently and unwillingly
helped to kick off the French Revolution, and in general was about as easy to pin down and force to
conform to society’s dictates as it is to force a greased moray eel in a tank full of baby bass to practice
diet-control.
Georg Cantor (1845-1918), Russian-born German mathematician who revolutionized mathematics with
his contributions to the foundation of a theory of transfinite sets – and died in a madhouse shortly after he
was finally recognized and honored for his tremendous contribution to modern mathematics, as he
deserved to be. Recognition came too late for him, after too many years of grinding poverty, rejection,
and humiliation.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955), musician, amateur sailor, and mathematician – who, in 1906 e.v., just two
years after Aleister Crowley wrote Liber AL, nearly single-handedly launched a revolution in the physical
sciences that has had the world reeling ever since.
John Paul Jones (1747-1792), Scots-born American naval officer and privateer prominent in the
American Revolutionary War, founder of this country’s first navy.
Hyman George Rickover (1900-1986), Father of the Nuclear Submarine.
And last, but certainly not least, His Majesty the Emperor Joshua Norton, one of San Francisco’s
best-loved historical persons and (in his time) living legends, who combined the virtues of madness and
spiritual puissance and sagacity, especially exemplifies the nature of Neptune:

Everybody understands Mickey Mouse.

Few understand Herman Hesse.
Hardly anybody understands Einstein.
And nobody understands Emperor Norton.

– Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C.

Joshua Norton, or, as he preferred to be called, Norton I, proclaimed himself Emperor of the United
States and Mexico in 1859:

Although a pauper, he was fed free in San Francisco’s best restaurants.

Although a madman, he had all his state proclamations published in San
Francisco’s newspapers.
While rational reformers elsewhere failed to crack the national bank monopoly
with alternate currency plans, Norton I had his own private currency accepted
throughout San Francisco.
When the Vigilantes decided to have a pogrom against the Chinese, and sane men
would have tried to stop them, Norton I did nothing but stand in the street, head bowed,
praying. The Vigilantes dispersed.
Although a fool, Norton I wrote letters which were seriously considered by
Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria. Although a charlatan, Norton I was so beloved
that 30,000 people turned out for his funeral in 1880.203a

(See also Section 3 of Chapter 13 of Volume II of this work, concerning the hypothetical trans-Plutonian
Planet named after Joshua Norton, associated with Sephirah Aleph-sub-Null [ℵ 0].)

American emblems, sigils, symbols, folklore, and urban legend:

Davy Jones and his Locker

John Paul Jones