CHAPTER SIX:
A Chart for the Beginning
of the Federal Government - 4

It is very significant to see that in the chart I present here as a symbol of the U.S. Federal Government, the discovery of Neptune introduced a very important new factor which altered the gestalt, or overall planetary configuration, of the chart. I do not mean by this that Neptune, as a member of the solar system, did not in some way affect conditions on our planet before we became aware of its existence, but it was only in 1846 that Neptune became a new "word" in the vocabulary of the collective mind of mankind and the cosmic language of astrology. It became known and used because a new symbol was needed to deal with a vast new spectrum of conditions and realizations. Neptune and Pluto, as we saw earlier, were forming a "long trine" throughout the eighteenth century — a trine that was ending around 1789 — but most human beings were not really aware of the concrete importance and crucial meaning of the transformation beginning to take place at that time — even though not a few visionary minds and pioneers had intuitive realization, or rather dreams, of what had become to them the potential for a new humanity.
      Without these two planets, the March 4, 1789, chart belonged to the Seesaw type described earlier, because it featured a contrast between two groups of planets: Moon, Jupiter and Uranus on one side and the five other planets in Aquarius and Pisces (Venus, Mars, Saturn, Sun and Mercury) gathered within a 31-degree section of the zodiac on the other. The two groups are related by the trine of Saturn, Sun and Mercury to Jupiter, and by a broad square of Mars, Saturn and Sun to the Moon nearing its first-quarter phase — a dynamic phase that could be said to imply the cleaning up of the space on which a new building is planned for immediate erection.(7)
      When Neptune entered human consciousness in 1846, the Seesaw changed into a "Tripod" pattern.(8) While a Seesaw pattern reveals a contrast or conflict between two classes of factors at work within the personality (individual or collective), the introduction of a third factor evokes the possibility of a creative process of understanding which allows for, or is a promise of, all-inclusive integration. In the case of the U.S. Government's chart, the three-fold balance that was there from the beginning (but only in a state of latency) became increasingly the substance of a message of destiny when the Neptunian factor began powerfully to manifest as conscious intent — in terms of events, when the nation grew enormously in size and took on hemispheric responsibility with the Monroe Doctrine, in 1823. The type of organization symbolized by Saturn is limited, and exclusivistic, but the Neptunian type always seeks to include more space and more factors, and to exclude nothing it encompasses all that it is possible to include; and in its highest sense this means compassion. The coming to public consciousness of Neptune implied the inevitability of the eradication of slavery in the United States — and also the end of serfdom in Russia. It brought to the fore a new humanitarian trend, new religious movements, new modes of healing, and the prodigious development of means of communication all over the world.

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7. See The Lunation Cycle (Shambhala Publications).  Return

8. See Person-Centered Astrology or the booklet First Steps in the Study of Birth-Charts (C.S.A. Press).  Return