What's Love Got To Do With It? Neptune in Pisces/ Venus transit. 


I realise I've been harping on the Disestablishment of the Church string for some time. Hands up: I first predicted it in 2003 when Uranus went into Pisces (no show). Transits of Venus work in mysterious ways, however, and between this and the history of Neptune in Pisces in relation to the Church of England, the omens are stacking up. 


Front-page news in the UK today is the Coalition Government's new proposals on same-sex marriage. This will exempt the C of E from marrying gay couples 'in religious buildings'. At present anyone in the UK can be married in their own parish church, regardless of their religious beliefs. If the Church refuses to extend this right to same-sex couples, the UK will effectively have two forms of marriage; civil partnership in a registry office and a religious marriage in church. The Church fears that in this event, it will face a legal challenge from the European Court of Human Rights, and be stripped of its power to act as an 'agent of the state'. This schism, some say, would lead ultimately to disestablishment.  


The initial Civil Partnership Act was passed in 2004 - the year of the first of our present pair of Venus transits. The C of E originally backed this compromise, but says that this new extension of legal rights leads to an effective redefinition of marriage as a union between man and woman. This, and the still-divisive issue of women bishops, may represent a Venus transit too far (even though the new legislation will not come into effect until at least 2015). Many people have pointed out the irony of a Church founded on a royal divorce objecting to a form of marriage. 


In fact, some Church figures see this development as their biggest threat since the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s. Dramatic? Not so much. Neptune was in Pisces from March 1520 until December 1534. This encompassed the period of the English Reformation, culminating in the Act of Supremacy in 1534, which proclaimed Henry VIII Head of the Church of England. There was also a pair of Venus transits in 1518 and 1526, in the aftermath of Martin Luther's original Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, which sparked the Reformation in Europe (the Dissolution of the Monastries didn't get underway until 1536, under the Neptune-Jupiter conjunction in Aries... go figure).


Neptune was also in Pisces during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where Catholic sympathizer James II was deposed to ensure the Protestant succession. The Church of England became the established religion, and to be a practicing Roman Catholic was effectively illegal until the emergence of the Anglo-Catholic Movement of the 1840s. You guessed it, Neptune was in Pisces at this time too.

It is hard to pin down exactly what Venus transits mean, but love must have something to do with it. Throughout my lifetime, the Church has only ever been in the headlines on debates over sex, gender, politics, or funding. To quote Arthur Miller, they don't talk about God any more. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is opposed to solemnising gay marriage and has stated that there are advantages to disestablishment. Still, Williams himself will resign at the end of 2012. If he is replaced by a more liberal Archbishop, the present Church structure may survive and the disestablishment issue prove no more than scaremongering. 


However, with Pluto in Capricorn - square Uranus - currently drilling into England's Sun (1066 and 1801 charts) and breaking up institutions of state, this could be the time. In an age where many people are looking to alternative forms of spirituality, a division between Church and state may be an attractive and progressive move. But I wonder how much the issue matters and how many people actually care about ecclesiastical politics. This apathy, rather than esoteric doctrinal differences, may be the deciding factor.