Neptune in Gemini

A historical placement, running roughly from the mid 1880s to the turn of the century, and no one alive holds it. As with every Neptune sign, it covered some fourteen years of births, which makes it a description of an age rather than of a character. The age in question was drunk on print. Cheap newspapers, the telegraph, the popular novel and the spiritualist pamphlet all arrived together, and the cohort born under this sky grew up assuming that whatever was widely repeated was probably true.

The gifts were real. That generation wrote enormously and read enormously; it invented modern journalism, the detective story and the seance transcript, and it could not always tell which of the three it was producing. Neptune in Gemini dissolves the boundary between the reported and the imagined. Table-rapping and wire services flourished side by side because both promised voices from a distance. The deception was not stupidity. It was an appetite for news so keen that verification felt like ingratitude.

For those reading nineteenth-century charts, the house placement shows where a life was most susceptible to persuasive talk, and where it did its finest inventing. Aspects to Mercury are the crucial ones; they mark the writers, the fabulists and the confidence men of the period, often the same people at different hours. The cohort is gone, but its habit of treating circulation as evidence was bequeathed intact to everyone who came after.