And from the Synchronicity Department:

Leave it to Google to commemorate the birthday of Jules Verne, author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with a doodle featuring a perfect depiction of today’s ingress of Chiron into Pisces: a view of undersea fish through the focusing ‘lenses’ of portholes. We’re in a vessel (Chiron) traversing oceans (Pisces) as described in How to Cross an Ocean; How to Light a Fire. And apparently the correct translation of the book’s title is ‘Seas’ not ‘Sea’, meant to indicate 20,000 leagues of travel around the globe’s seven seas, rather than depth (although even four leagues gets a person into interesting waters). Not only that, but the doodle is interactive, featuring a toggle switch so the viewer can direct and expand the view (and therefore awareness) through taking action; direct experience is an aspect of Chiron Eric emphasizes in much of his writing, and from what I’ve read, a key part of the way to use this transit in the spiritual, fluid, sub-surface realms that Neptune represents.

Verne, born Feb. 8, 1828, also wrote A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days and other novels depicting “extraordinary journeys” in which he described space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised, according to Wikipedia. Credited as being one of the founders of science fiction (along with H.G Wells and Hugo Gernsback), his books suffered from poor translations into English in which his exact calculations often were omitted or mis-transposed from metric into Imperial measurements.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea begins with accounts of a massive, luminescent, impossibly fast “monster” of the sea — what turns out to be the submarine Nautilus, helmed by Captain Nemo — sighted in far corners of the globe. It takes hold of the public’s imagination:

In every big city the monster became the fashion: it was sung in cafés, derided in newspapers and discussed on the stage. Scandal sheets had a marvelous opportunity to print all kinds of wild stories. Even ordinary newspapers — always short of copy — printed articles about every huge, imaginary monster one could think of, from the white whale, the terrible “Moby Dick” of the far north, to the legendary Norse kraken whose tentacles could entwine a five-hundred-ton ship and drag it to the bottom. Reports of ancient times were mentioned, the opinions of Aristotle and Pliny who admitted to the existence of such monsters, along with those of the Norwegian bishop, Pontoppidan, Paul Heggede and finally Mr. Harrington, whose good faith no one can question when he claims to have seen, while on board the Castillan in 1857, that enormous serpent which until then had been seen in no waters but those of the old Paris newspaper, the Constitutionnel.

It was then that in scientific societies and journals an interminable argument broke out between those who believed in the monster and those who did not. The “question of the monster” had everyone aroused. Newspapermen, who always pretend to be on the side of scientists and against those who live by their imagination, spilled gallons of ink during this memorable campaign; and some even spilled two or three drops of blood, after arguments that had started over sea serpents and ended in the most violent personal insults.

It may be a bit of a stretch, but even these themes of documentation and creative illusion-making (art) seem to tie in with the Chiron in Pisces era. Let’s dive…