When I was 23 I lived in a crappy little rental house with my then boyfriend. He was also a Libra in case you were wondering. Yes, we were two little Libras happily co-habitating until his mother came to visit. Don’t get me wrong, she was an awesome lady. We got along smashingly at first. It was the day she noticed someone left a light on in the closet and discovered our makeshift grow room that everything changed. So that’s what that smell was! We only had eight plants but I guess that was enough to boggle the mind of a little 65 year old Chinese lady. She went berserk. At first she blamed me, then she blamed the town we lived in, then she blamed rap music. I should mention this was not the first time that her son had attempted to grow marijuana, he was what you would call a hobby horticulturalist.
After everything blew over she went home and cooked up a scheme to rescue her son who through no fault of his own kept falling prey to these American evils! I should mention that he was 11 years older than me, so we’re talking about a (technically) grown man. She was starting a “business” which would require his assistance and he was to drop everything and come at once for an undetermined amount of time. I should mention this “business” was to be located in her hometown of Qingdao. For those of you who don’t drink Chinese beer, that’s in China. (Qingdao is famous for being occupied by Germans, nice beaches and its namesake beer, TsingTao)
He refused to go without me and she eventually caved and said I could come. So off we went to Qingdao. The three of us moved into an apartment on the fourth floor of of a large building with no elevator. Thus began the most surreal year of my life. I should mention, his mother was also a Libra.
In 1942 Pluto formed a sextile with Neptune. The two have stayed in this aspect since Pluto has been on the fast side of his cycle and will continue on like this for another couple decades. What this means is that the vast majority of you reading this have/will have the experience of transiting Pluto conjunct your natal Neptune sometime in your 20’s. As a result it has become the coming of age transit of our modern times. It’s the stuff that movies about lost and lonely, dare I say disillusioned twenty-somethings are made of. It is a time when our dreams, ideals, and illusions become deepened or destroyed. Either way we come out transformed with long, and I mean loooong term effects.
When someone asks me about this transit I begin by couching it in the phrase “transformational dream ______” What’s in the blank depends on where this takes place in your chart (i.e. sign/house.) My trip to China happened during this transit to my fourth house in Sagittarius. It was my transformational dream journey. It took me far away from home and redefined my concept of home and family.
So, heres my question for you: Where were YOU during this transit? Fill in the blank… “this transit was my transformational dream ______” note: if you had a crappy time (its been known to happen), feel free to substitute “nightmare” for “dream.”
Not sure when yours was? Post the degree of your natal Neptune and maybe someone will be kind enough to help you look it up.
Hmm, no I’m not really sure how to look mine up. On my chart it says 21 Sco 21’22” if anyone feels like doing me the favour. It would be interesting to know what was happening in my life at that time, actually.
As this conjunction became exact in Scorpio (my 5th house), I was an American living in France – an unemployed mom with an abusive husband who threatened to have me deported. I decided enough was enough, packed what I could carry (which included the 14 month old) and went home.
I transformed in making a stand that I wasn’t going to put up with that shit!
Hey snapdragon, Yours would have started around the end of 1991/beginning of 1992.
I have Neptune in Capricorn so rrrright now. I wonder if our Pluto in Scorpio generation is more “Reality Bites,” I sense not. People are making something of themselves.
It lasts a year?
I love this article, Nota!
Dina, The length varies depending on retrograde motions, but generally speaking, this is an unforgettable year of your life.
For me 1998/1999. Neptune is in my first house conjunct my Sagittarius AC. Um, I was an international flight attendant at the time, so I was traveling lots of countries, but I think at that age my personality, while being transformed, was still largely undeveloped. I was discovering my transformational dream self.
I also have Neptune in cap PLUS its conjunct uranus, in the 6th house. Pluto hasn’t quite gotten made it there. “Transformational dream…….. job?” Lol boring! I like yours better, what with the marijuana plants marking the beginning of the journey 🙂
Oh thanks Nota. Hmm the only thing I can think of is that I guess I was really starting life as an adult, with my ex. So yeah, maybe more of a nightmare, lol. It’s def not my most transformational time at all though, not by a long shot.
fourth house: bought my first home, genuinely my dream come true.
Vahcombusta, Funny thing about those plants… I went to my mom’s house last month to get a couple boxes of old books out of her shed. As I was going through them, some old flattened, dried pot leaves fell out of a big encyclopedia of WWII. Libra guy had put them in there the way an old lady would press flowers like keepsakes. He was weird like that. My mom thought they were hilarious.
Lmao! Stoner crafts. Some people get sentimental with their pot, I’ve noticed. Same as anything else really (Although they’d probably deny it)
I am stuck too please – Neptune 26 Scopio 42’2″ is what my chart says.
Thank you in advance educated ones.
🙂 Lori
Hmmm it’s coming yet for me? In 2011?
Sorry guys I am a rookie, lol.
Lori
Oh my god! Just looked it up. That year was so incredibly full with so MUCH transformational stuff, I haven’t seen anything like it since… I guess the simplest things to say about it, is that by the end of Pluto’s transit over my Neptune, I gave up drinking. A huge thing, for sure, but doesn’t come close to the bazillion other transformations that occurred during that time. In career, love, homelife, work, creativity, luck, family (that one, not so positive, come to think of it), friendships, jobs, etc. (Could that much possibly be explained by my natal Neptune being in the 12th? Hmm..) Wish I could get that sort of lucky, dreamy, wide-open, absolutely over flowingly full year again. ::sigh:: Ah, youth!
Thanks Nota!
Oh- “this transit was my transformational dream…. overhaul?!”
Neptune 7 Scorpio 10’56”
goinghome, yours was circa late 93/early 94.
Brizo, 1986 for you.
Pluto went over my fourth-house Neptune in late 1985 – 86. I moved in with my then-boyfriend and less than two months later we moved to another city for his job. The relationship didn’t last the year, but it was a very valuable experience overall that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. And it was very difficult to move back to my parents’ home (no choice, my job didn’t pay enough for me to stay in that city on my own) after that, felt like a huge step backward.
oh that is an excellent topic!
It started as a nightmare which then led to a transformational dream a few years later. See when Pluto went over my Neptune, it went over the T square that Neptune is involved in, and opposed personal planets.
A long process hard to summarize. Many, many veils were lifted. And beyond the veils blanks about my life before age 10 started coming together. I was amnesiac and had not known it. Piecing bits of the puzzle gave everything a new meaning. Merely knowing there was a puzzle to piece explained so much. From caterpillar to butterfly.
Long terms effects… indeed, those cant not be over emphasized.
July 1st 1984, what a year it was. t Saturn conj n. mars. t neptune conj n. mercury. t Jupiter conj n moon. t mars conj n mars. t pluto conj n neptune. 5 planets rx Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Pluto. Using an orb of 3 degrees t pluto was hanging around my n neptune for a few years, during those years I had my 2 daughters and yes those girls changed my life, for the better. Them: “D what happened to you?” Me: “I became a mom and those girls saved my life.” Before that I was on the fast track to hell, yes my life was transformed.
sag
fourth house
had a baby. burned down and rebuilt my sense of spirituality from the ground up.
lost a huge amount of naive idealism. (what idealism is left, though, is quite strong;y tempered.)
felt like my head got invaded by the cold of space for while. but i loved the stars and found a sort of peace with it.
pluto was also playing hopskotch with saturn and a few other things while he seesawed back and forth over the degrees…
also means my son’s pluto is doing all this stuff in my chart. and, well, raising him = constantly transformative.
and, daisy, i think motherhood pulled me out of the fire pretty effectively, myself.
2001.
Moved in with the ex that year. Bought my first pet (as in, with my own money and not received as a gift, my own pet). Normal “first time living with a romantic partner” experiences (I think?).
Not very 6th-house except for the bunny part.
This is one of those “don’t I love astrology” moments for me ! My Pluto conjunct Neptune took place in 1999 and 2000, in the 4th house. And, as Nota, I also ended up living with my boyfriend’s family abroad during the transit after loosing a job and place to stay.
Also, there was a nasty dispute over a small inheritance I got from a Greataunt. A relative (lawyer) knowingly withheld information from me and when that didn’t help, tried to get a cut for her “client” under false pretence. Luckily, as a student, I had access to legal advice provided by my University Student Board, but it took over a year to get the final decision.
late 2004-2006… was the hardest and most depressing years for me, my ex went all wack-job on me, living in a foreign with a baby until I packed up my stuff and begged my mum for a plane ticket home.
Sag in 12th house.
going on right now. In my 6th house. Transformational dream body, to be entirely honest. Got major surgery on my ankle this may, in physio now, slowly building up strength, transforming myself into the person I want to be. Feels so sloooow right now though.
Looking for work, cutting the crap out of my daily routine, making writing a daily part of it even if I have to do something else to make money for a while. So maybe hopefully also transformational dream job, if I’m lucky. 😉
The day my daughter was born in Feb, r. Pluto was conj. my AC @ 7 Scorpio. (I have Neptune 8 Scorp. conj. Asc @ 7), and Pluto turned direct again the next summer, 1987.
At the time, Papa Doc Duvalier and Ferdinand Marcos both came down, as well as the space shuttle Challenger; but enough about the world, let’s talk about me :-).
This heralded a series of transformational shitstorms of the first order in my life. Looking back, I think I’d best learn to go with the flow, eh, Nota? For academic purposes I will post this:
FEB 05, 1985 | 07:38 PM | 04SC45 | PL SR |
| JUL 12, 1985 | 04:13 AM | 01SC55 | PL SD |
| FEB 08, 1986 | 04:03 PM | 07SC22 | PL SR |
| JUL 15, 1986 | 02:45 AM | 04SC32 | PL SD |
| FEB 11, 1987 | 12:24 PM | 09SC58 | PL SR |
| JUL 18, 1987 | 01:17 AM | 07SC09 | PL SD |
| FEB 14, 1988 | 08:43 AM | 12SC35 | PL SR |
| JUL 19, 1988 | 11:49 PM | 09SC46 | PL SD |
| FEB 16, 1989 | 04:56 AM | 15SC11 | PL SR |
| JUL 22, 1989 | 10:15 PM | 12SC22 | PL SD |
| FEB 19, 1990 | 01:04 AM | 17SC47 | PL SR |
| JUL 25, 1990 | 08:35 PM | 14SC58 | PL SD |
| FEB 21, 1991 | 08:57 PM | 20SC23 | PL SR |
| JUL 28, 1991 | 06:54 PM | 17SC34 | PL SD |
I could write a book. I could go down the black hole just digging back into this time. (That was a double entendre ((smirks))) If I weren’t cryin, I’d be laughin. EVERYTHING happened then. Great work, Nota!
sorry…forgot to credit Astropro’s Richard Nolle for the published Pluto Retrograde table…
Neptune in sag in the 2nd. Had low self worth. Had absorbed a lot of money fears from my mother. (moon in 9th). Realized that I had to ignore them/believe in my worth. Focused on that. Jumped from waitressing, to first job in my industry that for my industry underpaid, to a lucrative contract position at one of the top businesses in my industry due to the help of a scorpio with saturn in sag. 🙂 She’s still a good friend. Had crappy relationships. And the increase in wealth didn’t really carry over to relationships well. Now I’m working on that.
Scorpio Neptune in 6th conj Desc. During the Pluto transit the fog cleared and I realized what a slug I was married to. I divorced him in 1991.
here’s a link to an ephemeris (where you can look this up if you know the placement of your natal neptune). just start somewhere in your 20s and remember neptune moves slowly (only a few degrees in a year or so). i hope the link will come thru, otherwise google ephemeris and astro.com:
http://www.astro.com/swisseph/swepha_e.htm
when pluto hit my neptune i was 22. i quit my job in the city and moved to boston to work for a professor, which eventually led to grad school and the career i have now. my natal neptune is in my 11th, needless to say i met a bunch of friends completely different from any i’d had before. and we drank a lot (but not in a bad way, just in that young + wild way). i learned a lot, i changed my views on love and friendship and what is worth working for in the world. 7 years later i married one of those people =)
Nota – THANK YOU. I wasn’t sure which transforming moment it would be, so I looked up a few of the times in my life that I changed dramatically. Where it lands is indeed the pivoting moment of who I was and who I am!
For me, it came in 1990. My mother’s cancer had metastasized from her ovaries to the brain – even tho the doctors all said that never happened. The tumor was on the part of her brain that controlled movement to her left side. I had just started dating the man I would marry, and in fact married him one degree prior to the exact conjuction. I had a friend who was an oncology nurse who took care of her while we went to Colorado for a week. When I got home, she could no longer walk without a walker, nor rise from her chair without assistance.
The next 16 weeks was spent taking care of her and holding her hand as she moved toward the death of her body.
Tranforming? Oh, without a doubt. It was a nightmare at the time, but it was the best gift of my life. My view of death, thanks to the experience and the guidance of her hospice team and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, is healthier and more joyous than that of most people I meet. At her funeral, and even now, people are just stunned when I say I was sad that I was without her, but delighted that she could hear the music and cut a rug like she did before she got sick in ’83.
I love you, Mom.
@venusflytrap- Thanks for the link – I was able to figure out my conjunction easily.
@Nota- This is really interesting and explains so much about my experiences during that transit. My Neptune in Scorpio in my 6th house, conjunct my descendant was the biggest influence, however, the transits taking place from my 6th through my 8th houses were involved as well. Saturn through Pluto, all outer planets, were transiting my Cap Moon as well as my Neptune. During this time, I was taking care of my father-in-law for the last year of his life… He had three terminal illnesses and was a really bitter, mean old man… God rest his soul… It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I felt so alone. My exes family just dumped him on me and expected that I’d take care of everything. I did. I also had three children, my oldest was eight, my youngest was two… It felt as if that one year stretched into ten. The stress of it all made my body ill and I had a case of pneumonia after he died that lasted for six months. It just held on to me and moved back and forth from one lung to the other and sometimes infected both lungs at once. From October until May, I was on the verge of joining my newly dead father-in-law. I finally recovered and about a year and a half later moved to a city where I spent the next fifteen years. I divorced my then husband shortly after the move and created a life of my own, raised my kids and went to college. The lessons I learned during that time were more about me than my FIL. I found out how strong I was and that death isn’t the end but the transition to the next level. I can look back and still feel the way things were then, but the hurt and sting seem to have diminished with time. Wow, this post has had a cleansing effect for me. Thanks again, Nota! Clearing out all the negative emotions that have been stored up for 20+ years seems to be what this current Mercury rx in Virgo is all about for me… Very cathartic, very healing, very healthy for me to let go…
I hope I actually take advantage of it. Sigh. If it was all of 2010, I did butt nothing this year.
Great post Nota! Pluto transitted my N. Neptune in Scorpio, 1st house, which included my N. Moon. Definately a transformational dream journey for me too. – And it included my Mother-in-Law no less!
It was in 1989. My husband and I moved from WA State to Kauai HI that year. To help with the expensive relocation his Mother (who I had only met a couple of times) moved there too and we shared a house. BIG mistake! She became so horrid to live with and interfered with our relationship enough that I ended up moving out on my own. That lasted a couple of months until my husband finally chose me over his mother and we found a place for just the two of us.
It definately was a powerfully impactful time in my life- one I’ll never forget!
@ Dina – I bet that view will change with perspective over time. Remember elsa saying it takes at least a good ten years to process pluto transits? I believe it. Hitting moon/merc too in my chart, so it’s gotta be having a hay-day with yours. Good luck!
My Neptune is 4 Scorpio 33’19”
SaDi, haha, you had a transformational dream pet.
Mena, Wow! I would love to hear about that sometime.
Korellyn, great minds think alike, I was about to say the same thing to Dina. It may seem like nothing is happening now, but when you look back it will really hit you how your life changed at this time.
Flip, end of 1984 to 1985
Read_em, I’m really glad to hear this was cathartic for you.
Ooh ¡¡ Thank you nota¡¡
*LOL* OMG, I did!! 😀
I loved the shit out of that rabbit, he was most excellent.
thanks nota – mine was in 1990/91ish. And yes, that was the first time I left the abusive ex after having been with him for almost 10 years at that point. I moved away from him completely, furniture, everything. Then he kept showing up and demanding I take him back. Terrible. Then he showed up with a gun and well, I took him back. I left him for good in 93.
End of 84 to 85, big life changes were going on for me. My boyfriend was diagnosed with 4th level melanoma. I had to tranfer law school just before my third year so that I could move with him to Chicago. He had cancer surgery. I graduated in 85 and was sworn into the bar. It was a start of being an adult. I have a bad case of arrested development.
nota this is so good–learned something new, too, thanks!!
this was my transformational nightmare. it was in my 12th House and activated my Saturn-Neptune-Venus/Mars trine. Inconjunct my Sun.
Almost died in an accident. Then 2 close friends amputated me. Then my 2 closest girlfriends left the country. Then my aunt died. Then I lost my apt (couldn’t work after the accident and moved in with my then-partner). Then HE almost died in an accident. Then my uncle died. It was a horrific 12 months. Life went on in it’s own shitty way but good things happened too, like TRAVELING, wooooot!
I can’t think of anything that happened 93/94 (I have a 23 deg neptune?) but in 92 I started college as a nontraditional adult student and ended up going on to earn 2 master’s degrees hahaha.
It’s comming up ..pluto is at 2 deg cap now, my neptune 3 deg cap , in the 7th house. I want extreme change in my life, I have been stuck the last 7 years and it’s killing me. But I am very afraid what drama it can bring along. My littlebrother called last night (he lives in another town), crying and just sounding so misrable..he said he wanted to kill himself, he just broke up with his girlfriend , and I told him he needs to move back..he has little friends there.,but I am afraid we can’t offer him what he needs , he is much more emotional than me so there is limits to what I can help him with ,because we have diffrent lingua emotionel. I told him to stay out of relationships, he is to young (20). I don’t know what to do.
my bestfriend is moving 9 hours away, and we usually meet everyday..It is going to be hard. They just cut off the electricety in my house, and I have no food . I hope this is not how its going to be
Just found the comments, thanks Korellyn and Nota! That’s helpful.
would love to try some tsingtao
Oh no! My natal neptune is right on my 7th house cusp (right on the descendant) – and what’s more, that’s 2 degrees away from my sun/moon midpoint!
I’ve tried to look up how pluto transting DSC means, or so on, but it still doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t add up – the bits and pieces of info out there i mean. I’m having a difficult time being alone and understanding, appreciating, changes in my personal/social sphere. But that’s about as much as I can say, I’m not that introspective :(.
This neptune + pluto transiting my neptune on my descendant has got to mean something, right? Nota would you have any insight? 🙁
I should also mention that neptune is my MC ruler.
When it retroted back and forth over my neptune in 1997 I lost my grandmother and I realize now I was living in a Transformational Nightmare relationship. I have woke up from it but am just starting to remember and process much of it and neptune is now beginging its square to my natal neptune and saturn is sextiling neptune and sextiling transiting pluto on my natal jupiter..