Neptune in Sagittarius and the astrology of the 1970s cults
I recently watched the Netflix documentary “Wild, Wild Country” about the town created by the followers of Baghwan Shree Rajneesh that began as a utopia of blissful cooperation and devolved into madness and unimaginably bizarre crimes of attempted murder and fraud.
The conjunction of Uranus (radical change) and Pluto (destruction of the old and transformation of the new) in the late 1960s took place in conservative Virgo, and the established morays of the previous decades were blown apart to smithereens. Women began fighting for the right to be equal citizens. People of color refused to sit in the back of the bus and demanded to sit at lunch counters and use any damn water fountain they pleased.
Religion was another arena that saw a radical transformation as the dogma of established religion was questioned and many began exploring other religions, including Eastern mysticism. The acid experiments of the 1960s led to the spiritual seeking of the 1970s, symbolized most prominently by the conversion of Richard Alpert, colleague of Timothy Leary in the search for psychedelic enlightenment, who transformed into Ram Dass in 1971.
Neptune is the planet of spiritual experience and humanity’s search for an authentic connection with the divine. Where Jupiter creates theologies and religious belief systems, Neptune says “forget all that nonsense and come directly to me.” Neptune traveled through Scorpio between 1956 and 1969-1970 and inspired a desire to release sexuality from the shackles of marriage (Neptune in Libra) and eventually, in the 1960s, to experience sexuality as a pathway to bliss. Neptune in Scorpio also generated a renewed interest in the occult, with the release of the Rider-Waite tarot deck to the general public in 1959.
Neptune moved into Sagittarius in 1970, bringing the Sagittarian interest in […]
