.: hidden scripts :. (Pluto/Neptune)

...On the sextiles ahead of us (again)

the dreamspell

• …with the cacophony of alignments this July, I’ve decided to break them up a bit so that we can better understand this minor grand trine that is building amongst so many other themes. Here are the previous installments:

  .: do the math :. (Jupiter/Pluto)

.: cauldron < code > :. (Pluto/Uranus)

And now, for this one…

~the Cycle

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Every 492 years or so, Neptune and Pluto meet in the invisible landscape to program the dreamspell for the half-millennium ahead. Every time they do, a world ends, and another begins. Each conjunction scripts a fresh Ragnarok: the old assumptions and the pantheon that guards them are swapped — the temple systems, the empires, the philosophies with tenure — march off their posts, and a new troop of stories steps out of the clearing mist and begins to work on everyone’s reality. It’s a big idea. It’s worth our time. So, let’s explore it, shall we...

A living myth is hard to spot. It doesn’t present as a belief entirely; it moves through everything without notice most of the time. Sometimes we catch a glimpse, but it often stays folded inside the dreamworld. The medieval peasant didn’t believe in purgatory the way we believe in sports teams — he believed in it the way you believe in a sunrise. That’s the water, we’re the fish, and Neptune–Pluto are the whole aquarium. Nobody asks the fish for a review of the water. It’s a knowing so deeply ingrained we don’t experience it as an assumption, only as fact.

Neptune is the enchantment cast into the collective mind; Pluto, the voltage that powers and protects it. Together they rule every preconception we’ve ever had. There are only two known ways to see past a spell this size — study the expired ones, or ingest wyrd molecules. Preferably in that order. To see through the matrix of the Neptune–Pluto cycle is the work of a lifetime. And what follows is about the stretch of the cycle when that work gets easiest — the window when the dream, briefly, allows lucidity. From conjunction to sextile, we find ourselves. It’s where we’ve been for some time, and will remain for nearly the next decade.

After each conjunction, as the world settles into its newly written hidden script, Neptune and Pluto slide into their sextile — normally a quick handshake of an aspect, easy to overlook, but because Pluto’s orbit is eccentric and they are both so far out there, this particular sextile sticks, holding on and off for the better part of a century. Rudhyar’s insight was that anything lasting that long stops being an aspect and becomes an atmosphere — the background hum of civilization, the key everyone alive is composing in without knowing it. A collective cymatics experiment, with our minds as the sand. Nobody experiences this sextile as a transit; everybody experiences it as reality. And so, the strange gift floating around inside it is that the same aspect that keeps the dream humming is the one that lets you wake up inside it. The sextile is the dream’s lucidity window. Soon it opens for the third and final time this cycle. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Best we don’t miss it.

current setup

The sextile is the aspect of opportunity and allied support. Starting at the end of July, the sky begins dealing them out in a run that carries through not only the rest of the year, but for nearly the decade. It’s lucidity we are after, not sleeping pills and more screens. This is elemental harmony with teeth: the fixed air of Pluto in Aquarius exactly sixty degrees from the cardinal fire of Neptune in Aries — air feeding fire, a hot twister set to rip through the collective imagination for the foreseeable future. Our role? To see it. To read the hidden script before it’s too late. And — most importantly — to decode ourselves out of it, to wake up inside the dream with purpose. One might call it the Great Work of our lives. It’s not too far off.

~ dreamseed: 1892

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” — Nietzsche, ten years ahead of the conjunction

Our current dream was signed into existence at the conjunction of 1891–92, in Gemini. The cycle it renewed began in the late fourteenth century, when the meeting point first crossed over from Taurus to Gemini — which means we’re not in a new conversation but in the deepening of one, five centuries running (Dan Waites has some great work on this). Leading into the conjunction, Nietzsche had already filed the death certificate for the old paradigm — in the tone of a man reporting a gas leak everyone else had decided was palo santo. And right on schedule, the gods of the iron throne and gilded altar were cleared out. The old code of faith was deprecated; the kernels of Renaissance thought compiled into something calling itself science. The lights literally came on, information began traveling through tunnels in the air, and the next Gemini hum started up beneath it all. We are still in it. And we are just getting started.

5 previous dreamspells (conjunctions)

The era’s whole shadow inventory arrived in the same planetary shipment. Freud and Jung started dredging the unconscious, which turned out to be less a subjective basement than an ocean of mysteries — one with more questions than answers. The world’s traditions began cross-pollinating like an unsupervised greenhouse: Vivekananda in Chicago, Theosophists everywhere, everyone suddenly comparing scriptures like trading cards. It felt like a Renaissance because the one from before had completed its cycle, and the next was underway. And as a telling gift, we also built ourselves the cinema — that very decade. A world announces its ruling metaphor with its first invention: the medieval world built cathedrals; we built a dream machine and sold tickets to it. Subtle, yes — but once seen from this angle, it can never be unseen. The new gods are the stars of that screen, that stage, that program. We are not just entertained to death; we’ve been quietly worshipping the replacements without a clue of what we are doing. Neptune is our escape, Pluto holds the power, unseen. The riddle of our time. Attention, as the greatest commodity, with the most leverage.

The dreamseed worked. It always does. A hundred and thirty-odd years on, half of the West no longer believes in God, and nearly all of it kneels in the Church of Progress — cataclysmic consequences notwithstanding. We measure our days in data, narrate our lives in film grammar, and trade everything — attention, outrage, genomes, meme coins — in the great Gemini bazaar. Nobody signed up for this worldview, and nobody remembers signing, which is exactly how you know it’s a Neptune–Pluto production. And yet here we all are, every one of us carrying the sextile in our own chart. So what does it mean? What can we do with it? And what of the passes soon rising on the horizon?

~ a ‘hundred’ years of sextiles

“The waking have one common world, but the [dreamers] turn aside each into a world of his own.” — Heraclitus

Now, a deeper look at the sextile itself — that sly sixty degrees between the two. In our cycle it breaks into three Phases: 1. exact through the 1950s; 2. again from 1976–86; 3. and one last time from 2026 to 2032 — with a decade or more of felt influence on either side, depending on the orbs you use.

It is a waxing sextile we are dealing with, meaning we are still early in the great ~500-year cycle. From the discoveries of the late nineteenth century through the Second World War, the dream grew quietly; postwar, it set in for keeps. Entertained and distracted, we drank from the wrong spring — the Forgetting one, Lethe. We’ve become a species whose amnesia looks scheduled to last at least into the early 2030s, the last of the sextiles. But not for everyone. In every cycle there are those who wake or break from the spell. Our job is to study the ones who escaped theirs. We need true inspiration, not more content.

sextiles into 28’, with more to come after

Run the tape all the way back to the axial conjunction of the 500s BCE, and the founding class of thinkers appears more or less at once — Lao Tzu, Socrates, Plato, etc. Whether you pin them to the conjunction or the sextile matters less than the pattern: near the beginning of each cycle, a handful of people transcend their prison of assumptions about reality. The Buddha walks the earth around this time — a man whose name simply means “the one who woke up.” A few cycles later, in the sextile decades after the 1399 conjunction, the Renaissance runs the same play: Ficino translating Hermetic contraband by candlelight, Erasmus writing In Praise of Folly — spell-detection disguised as stand-up — and Gutenberg mass-producing the medieval dream’s obituary while Copernicus, in his private observatory, did something unforgivable to the sky. The pattern holds: every cycle, a few slip the collective hypnosis the same way — by staying open to new ideas and following them wherever they lead. The rest call them crazy. They aren’t understood until the next cycle — or two thousand years later — when their satori moments are finally appreciated.

All told, the sextile makes forty-eight exact hits. Said another way: the sky sets forty-eight alarms per cycle, and most of us can’t help but hit the snooze. Phase one, the 1950s, opens with the atomic flash — involuntary lucidity. Orwell’s 1984; Jung reading flying saucers as the new myth arriving in secular drag; Huxley eating mescaline and reporting back that the doors of perception had hinges after all; Alan Watts translating maya for the suburbs. Phase two, 1976–86: Philip K. Dick stands up in France and announces that we are living in a computer-programmed reality to an audience that assumes he is being literary. He was not. The hippies still roamed the earth; rock and roll was tearing at the veil at the crest of that wave before it crashed; Gibson coins "cyberspace"; the personal computer arrives, so the dream can have a screen in every home. Veil, cave, spectacle, simulation — with each pass, the dream’s own machinery hands us a better mirror. By 1999, the second phase’s art had boiled down into the single word everyone now uses for this work: the Matrix. But watching the movie is not the same as taking the pill, and taking the pill is not the same as acting on it. So what will the themes be in these final passes — and who will be the ‘awakeners’ of the decade ahead?

Phase three: now until the early ‘30s. After 2032, the harmonies begin to get dissonant, drifting toward what inevitably comes next — the square. Not all of us will be around for that one, but history offers a preview into the troubles of the late sixteenth century (last cycle’s waxing square): the crisis that eventually cracked open into the Enlightenment. What stands between now and then is this closing decade of the lucidity window — the decade we battle with, and over, AI — and by the end of it, nobody will know what is real anymore. Well, except those who have peeked behind the veil. The work of defragging from the dreamspell has never been harder. Which makes it all the more interesting.

The conjunction plants the dreamseed; the sextile grows its synapses — keeping most of us comfortably inside the simulation while the mercurial few hunt for the escape hatch. But notice what the escapees actually did. The Buddha saw through maya and then hung around inside it for another forty-five years. Erasmus kept writing. Dick kept publishing paperbacks. Waking up was never a full exit, because there is no exit; it’s the difference between being dreamt and dreaming consciously. And with it comes something like a Bodhisattva vow — you wake, then you turn around and help everyone else.

Life is stranger than we can ever imagine, so when contemplating spans of time this large, remember: you can’t possibly know enough to worry about it. It’s good to have the sketch — the bones of it — but fully grokking what it all means is work best left to the sages. We can try, and we should; just don’t fall into the pits of despair around it all. It’s all perfect.

seeing outside the spell

For the rest of us, the practice starts smaller: find Pluto and Neptune in your own chart, and begin the contemplation there. It’s the one thread tying all generations together — we all carry this sextile somewhere, and it marks the difference between being drained by the dreamspell or being fed by it for free. The hidden script was never meant to stay hidden forever. Seeing the ‘water we swim’ in is the deepest soul work on offer. Nobody said it was easy. But it is unmistakably one of the most rewarding ways to spend our time. And once we can finally read the hidden script, we get to do the one thing the sleepers cannot: write a more interesting script! One where we are the spellcasters, not some other hand.

So — while the window is open — what will you write?

Wishing you lucid dreams throughout it all. Below, a few ways I may be able to help.

— Adam

to learn Astrology:

....to support my work and learn astrology all at the same time

to work with me:

...and schedule a reading or learn from my classes

a related essay: