The Storms & Archetype of Neptune

Posted by Marina Snyder – August 31, 2016

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Categories: Metaphysics & Unexplained Phenomena Science & Cosmology

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Below is an adapted excerpt from Richard Grossinger’s The Night Sky:

Neptune

Neptune is very blue—not the oceanic blue of Earth but the electrical blue of lapis lazuli or the flame of a pilot light—blue like exoplanet HD 189733b. Neptune’s atmosphere consists of layers of mostly hydrogen and helium floating above its surface, with moderate doses of methane that daub it a brighter blue than Uranus despite equivalent amounts of bluish gas on both worlds.

Since the two planets possess such similar masses and atmospheres, it is a mystery why Uranus is dully cyan while Neptune is luminescently purple-cerulean. Though the key is chemical and meteorological in nature, an occult phenomenology and message seem to transcend its physical basis. Looking at Neptune’s azure image while listening to its transposed sounds gives a sense of how much alien intelligence there is in the cosmos, stuff entering the solar system from beyond the human operating frequency: a lot. And that situation is Neptunian to the core.

The Neptunian Archetype

Piscean Neptune is psychic like Uranus, but more mystical than magical. In its personality it sometimes seems motiveless but undergoing dreamlike visions of a hidden cosmic unity. If Uranus is a scientist, shaman, and sorcerer, Neptune is a dreamer, clairvoyant, and prophet, more concerned with occluded shapes than zappy forces. It wants to listen clairsentiently to what the universe is saying and then conduct it neutrally through the system.

A Neptunian will create a work of art or philosophy rather than a machine or a technology. If Uranians invented the radio and the telescope, Neptunians gave both a planetary and cosmic context. The global European migration and spread of Western civilization is Neptunian; so are airlines and multinational corporations. Neptune is a medium and a musician associated with Venus; Uranus is a mechanic and an inventor associated with Mars.

Neptune is also dangerously unbalanced, tending toward schizophrenia, prone to drugs, hallucinating. If desperate Neptunian impulses are not monitored, alcohol, opium, and cocaine can annex its astral gardens.

The Storms of Neptune

Among aspects of the Neptunian system discerned by Voyager were the planet’s storminess, its complicated network of moons, and its faint rings. From climate-change discussions on Earth, which explain that the more heat reaching a planet’s atmosphere, the more commotion in its storms, one might expect that a body as far from a solar heat source as Neptune—with cloudtop temperatures measured at –224° C or –372° F—would lack the energy to create strong winds. Yet on Neptune, boras have been clocked at more than 1,400 miles per hour.

The scientific explanation is that, while sufficient energy to instigate storms is continuously generated by heat transfer from the planet’s core and circulates around its gigantic mass, there is not enough solar energy to muster a counter-turbulence to slow them down even to a Jovian pitch. Once Neptune’s supersonic winds get going, they encounter meager resistance and grow to the max of their inherent gravitational and thermodynamic potential. In the end, Neptune ejects far more energy than it receives from Sol, though the precise internal source is unknown.

Voyager discovered the so-called Great Dark Spot, a storm in Neptune’s southern hemisphere the size of Earth, but by the time the Hubble Space Telescope took its first pictures of the planet in November 1994 it had disappeared entirely and been replaced by another Dark Spot in the northern hemisphere. Neither was a Jovian-like cloud-free, anti-cyclonic storm system but a deep hole in the cloud deck, similar to the hole in the ozone layer of the Earth, generated and then removed by internal circulation. In any case, no one would want to be on a plane flight across southern Neptune during a downdraft. Hubble has spotted regular Neptunian superstorms since, most of them lasting at least a month.

The second-strongest cyclonic storm system on Neptune photographed by Voyager, also in the south, was named the Wizard’s Eye. Completely dark when discovered, it developed a bright expanding core as the satellite approached.

Conclusion

The poet Gerrit Lansing writes that the Neptunian dissolves to create. He is attracted to “the watery powers of the underworld,” the “criminal, the forbidden, the untasted, always seeking to unveil, though not through the rational mind.”¹ Neptune is a planet of mirage, rapture, enchantment, holy places, arcane speech, the relationship between sex and blood, the hierarchy of communion and communalism. Notably, Neptune was discovered in 1846, two years before the Communist Manifesto was published, so the Neptunian incursion catalyzed the astrological transmission of the latter’s effects into the world.

Notes

1. Gerrit Lansing, “The Neptunian Character,” in Io, no. 16 (Earth Geography Booklet, no. 4: Anima Mundi), edited by Richard Grossinger (Plainfield, Vermont, 1973), pp. 6–7.

Tags: Astrology Richard Grossinger Astronomy

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