Mystic Medusa
Remixture
:
A Pisces teenager invents the first synthetic purple dye by mistake.
He becomes fabulously wealthy and the industrial chemical complex is born.
It changes everything.
Jupiter transits always go over the top
and this one was amped by Neptune.
William Perkin
was a quintuple Pisces,
with the Sun conjunct Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Uranus,
the epitome of audacious ingenuity.
So it’s not surprising that he was a gifted
chemistry student
and by the age of 18, spending weekends holed up in a
makeshift home laboratory experimenting.
It was a wild era:
Neptune moved into Pisces shortly after its
controversial-at-the-time
Discovery in 1846.
The over-the-counter pharmaceuticals are today’s illegal narcotics and
Spirit Photography postcards were best-sellers.
But how’s this for a stunner of an astrological transit?
Jupiter and Neptune were conjunct in Pisces,
a phenom repeating
It’s significant because
Both planets are considered to rule Pisces.
At the time, however, Jupiter was the undisputed King of Pisceans,
as Neptune wasn't declared the so-called modern ruler until the 1880s,
or beyond.
Yet this conjunction was exact and conjunct Perkin’s Sun/Mars/Uranus that day.
A super-junior apprentice,
he was at home trying to synthesize quinine from coal for an assignment.
Chemical science of the time was called primitive
but a more apt term could be things exploding all the time
Somehow, William Perkin ended up with a
beaker of bright purple,
a color barely seen in normal life at that point.
Every color in existence was organic and difficult to obtain,
but purple was practically impossible.
Ancient Roman emperors and empresses didn’t swish around in gigantic
purple cloaks
because they liked the color:
it signaled insane wealth and influence.
To obtain even a quarter of a cup of it involved ‘milking’ the glands of
12,000 predatory sea snails – a specific breed of them that could only
be found in Phoenicia.
Even Queen Victoria didn’t wear purple then.
The teen scientist perceived the possibilities immediately.
He kept his Discovery
secret from everyone apart from a Gemini friend,
and the pair developed the purple in a garden shed.
Sixteen obsessive weeks later, they patented it.
It didn’t do brilliantly as Aniline Purple,
but when they changed the name to the more
French-sounding Mauveine, it became a global craze.
The invention laid the foundation for chemical fragrance,
mass fashion, hair dye, food coloring,
and the whole petrochemicals-in-everything
paradigm we live with today.
In the early 21st Century,
it’s become clear that the barely regulated synthetics that have
seeped into everything are an existential threat.
Still, the astrological resonance of this is fascinating.
If you think Neptune is purely a
transcendental groove
or a penchant for addiction, read on.
The chemical industry is
madly Neptunian:
Opaque by design
and the formulas are all trade secrets,
whether they’re going into the ocean,
your bloodstream, jellybeans, or above your eyes as eye-shadow.
Highly eloquent operatives enact Byzantine campaigns to win over politicians,
generate glamor spells and inspire desire or yearning.
It’s mirror magic.
They’re not selling you coal tar or palm oil.
You’re buying the dream fragrance.
Twelve years after he synthesized purple,
with Jupiter back in Pisces and again on his Pisces stellium,
William Perkin conjured up another vast fortune.
Via a new process, he created coumarin from tonka beans.
Probably one of the most profitable human-formulated substances in history:
it’s banned in some countries as a potential meta-hazard and is
apparently in 90% of perfumes, as well as rat poison.
But it smells amazing – like freshly mown hay, almonds, coconut,
frangipani, vanilla – whatever the creator wants it to smell like.
The more candy-like the scent,
The darker the Neptunian waters.
Jupiter into Pisces in May 2021,
ahead of April 2022’s Jupiter-Neptune conjunction in Pisces is
an early indicator of significant scenarios in the chemicals industry.
What would the teenage Piscean vegetarian
who said things like
the salts of mauveine are beautifully crystalline
make of contemporary
big chemical culture?
If he was a ghost,
I’d like to think he’d dart around in an
Aniline Purple haze
exhorting contemporary scientists
to fix it all up.
Thoughts?
Feelings?