Neptune in Gemini
Neptune last stood in Gemini from 1887 to 1902 and returns in 2051, so no one alive has it. It marks the dreamers of the first films, radio and telephone, and waits for the children of 2051.
Every film you have cried at in the dark owes something to the first audience that believed a picture could move.
Found with a pen
Neptune is the only planet found by arithmetic before anyone saw it. In 1846 the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier worked out from the wobbles of Uranus where an unseen planet had to be, and posted the answer to Berlin. A colleague of the time said it had been discovered with the point of a pen. Gemini, Mercury’s air sign, holds words, numbers and messages, and Neptune in Gemini makes those things dreamlike: the invisible made real by writing it down.
The talking machines
Its children, the grandparents of today’s grandparents, grew up as the telephone reached ordinary homes, Marconi sent radio signals across the Channel and then the Atlantic, and in 1895 the Lumière brothers showed the first films to a paying audience in Paris. Their generation dreamed of voices and pictures crossing any distance, and within their lifetimes the dream came true.
Their heroes were inventors, explorers and the novelists whose serials they waited for each week. They were great letter writers, great readers of serial novels, great believers in the power of the printed and the spoken word to change the world.
Your great-great-grandparents
If you have their letters, read how they wrote: long sentences, careful handwriting, news of cousins and weather and small hopes. That was their technology of connection, and they used it with devotion.
Swept along
The same magic misled. A generation in love with messages could be swept along by them: by rumour, by propaganda, by the new newspapers that sold fear as easily as facts. Information was magic, and magic can mislead.
Returning
Its return to Gemini comes in 2051, and whoever is born in those years grows up in a world whose messages are carried by machines we can barely imagine, and their dream, like their great-great-grandparents’, is of being understood across every distance.
The words those ancestors wrote are still being read, in drawers and archives and family trees, by people they never imagined, which was the dream all along.
Were you born with Neptune in Gemini?
Neptune comes to Gemini once every 165 years, so no one born between 1920 and 2030 has it. It was last there from 1887 to 1902, and returns in 2051.
Find your own Neptune
Your chart is free and takes a moment: the wheel, your Sun, Moon and rising sign, and where Neptune sits in it, to the degree.