An opposition between the two outermost planets is the rarest configuration in ordinary astrological practice, since it happens once per cycle and the cycle is roughly five hundred years long. The last occurred in the seventeenth century; the next is far beyond any chart a living astrologer will cast. A reader who has been told they have it has been given either a bad ephemeris or an orb of twenty degrees, and the correct response is to check the positions rather than to elaborate on the meaning.
The configuration itself is coherent enough to describe. Neptune at one end dissolves what Pluto at the other insists on holding and remaking, and the two face each other across the whole chart without any prospect of merger. At the scale of an age it marks periods in which the visionary and the coercive stand opposed in public life, each defining itself against the other. The seventeenth-century window is the one modern astrologers reach for, and it repays study more than it repays application to a client.
Should such a chart be read, the ordinary rules for oppositions hold. The native carries one end and encounters the other in people and institutions, and the houses show where. Resolution, as always, means holding both rather than electing between them. But the honest emphasis for a contemporary reader is different and simpler. No living native has this aspect. What such a chart almost certainly holds instead is the long sextile of the twentieth century, which asks far less and offers rather more.
What It Gives
- ◆clear sight of opposing forces
- ◆vision measured against real power
- ◆endurance across long conflicts
- ◆detachment from a single position
What It Costs
- ◆absent from all modern charts
- ◆routinely claimed on false orbs
- ◆no reconciliation of the two ends
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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