Article · Neptune
Neptune in Scorpio: what we want to carry forward
Teachers change. How can children keep falling in love with music?
Pavel Medvedev · Published: · Updated:
One teacher at Marina's school has students who are remarkably absorbed in music. They come to her lessons willingly, linger at the instrument afterward, and ask what they will play next.
She knows how to find a starting point even for someone who can do very little yet. She gives the student a few manageable notes and plays alongside them. Together, they make music worth listening to. The child hears that their small part matters and asks to do it again.
She invites another student to bring a favorite tune. With a third, she puts together a small ensemble. Gradually, the students begin listening more, taking an interest in pieces, and trying things for themselves.
Now the teacher is planning to retire.
Marina knows she can find a replacement, keep the teaching hours, and retain all the enrolled students. But will the lessons still leave children wanting to play more?
What exactly Marina wants to pass on
Her colleague has six months before retirement. Marina brings in a new teacher early and sets aside paid time for them to teach together.
What she wants to pass on is the ability to inspire a love of music. She asks her senior colleague to show how she finds an approach to different children: where she begins, what she notices, when she changes a piece, and how she helps a student hear real music in a few simple notes.
During one lesson, a child once again refuses to play an exercise. The teacher offers him a short part in a duet. She has chosen it so that the difficult movement from the exercise appears here too. The student tries, hears the music he is making with his teacher, and agrees to repeat it.
After the lesson, the colleagues discuss what happened. The teacher explains why she chose that part and how she knew the boy was ready to try. The new teacher suggests another duet for the next lesson.
Gradually, he begins teaching the lessons himself. His senior colleague listens, helps, and talks through what worked and what did not. Marina sets aside time for these conversations and invites the other teachers to join them.
The school's way of working changes. Previously, each teacher ran their class largely on their own. Now they look together for ways to draw students into music, share discoveries, and try new pieces.
Six months later, the teacher retires. Her successor chooses different music and organizes lessons in his own way. But the children still want to play. They bring in melodies, form ensembles, and ask about the next concert.
This is what Marina wanted to see in the future.
There are different things we might preserve
The school could have continued without this preparation. Lessons would still appear on the schedule, assignments would be given, and parents would pay. From outside, everything would look fine.
But Marina wants people to discover music here. She wants a child who once only listened to other people's recordings to feel one day: I can play too. To want to learn a new piece, hear other people, and perform with them for an audience.
Music is much larger than this school. Performers, listeners, composers, and people of all ages and occupations live through it. Lessons give children the chance to enter that life themselves.
The teacher's ability to engage them provided that entrance. This is why Marina invests in carrying it forward. The shared teaching hours, new responsibilities, and altered schedule serve this work.
This is where Neptune becomes visible. Music is larger than this school. Marina’s school is one of the places where it lives, and the teacher’s gift for drawing children in helps them enter that life. Marina helps pass on and develop that gift through new teachers.
What needs to change so that what matters can remain?
The Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa expressed a similar paradox in his novel The Leopard. Published posthumously in 1958, it follows characters in Sicily during Italian unification, as the old aristocracy confronts a new political order.
Tancredi, the Prince of Salina's nephew, says something that can be translated as:
If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change.
In the novel, this is a calculation about preserving status and influence. Taking part in change helps people adapt to the new order. Hence “Gattopardism”: a willingness to support change in order to preserve existing power and privilege.
The principle does not promise that what is preserved will be good. A powerful group can also secure its own continuation by changing its name, alliances, and methods.
But the question applies to a school too: what must we change now so that what we value can continue?
Marina could have kept the usual arrangement of lessons until her colleague's last day. She changed it in advance because she wanted to preserve the children's enthusiasm for music. Lampedusa helps us ask the question; Neptune's work emerges in Marina's answer. She passes on the ability to make a lesson an encounter with music that children will want to continue.
Erickson: helping a person become himself again
There is a well-known story by Milton Erickson about a police officer who had left the force because of ill health. He had emphysema, high blood pressure, and excess weight; he smoked, drank, and ate heavily. Everything he needed was sold close to his home.
Erickson suggested buying cigarettes one pack at a time from a distant store, buying food for only one meal at a time, and walking to another faraway bar for the next drink. Familiar purchases were to become reasons to walk.
The patient left swearing. Later, another visitor said he had come on the former officer's recommendation.
Erickson explained his directive manner by the discipline to which the former officer was accustomed. His service had ended, but his readiness to follow specific instructions remained. The doctor gave it a new use.
Why do we see Neptune's work here? In our reading, Erickson's task as a therapist was to restore the person's wholeness: to help him become himself again after a significant part of his familiar life had ended.
Discipline was bound up with the person he had become during his years of service. The ability to accept an assignment, carry it out, and follow an established order belonged to him. Leaving the police did not mean that this part of himself had to disappear along with the job.
But finding a place for it in his new life was difficult for him to do alone. Another person was needed. Erickson recognized a familiar way of acting and gave it somewhere to go: clear assignments, outings, walking to make purchases.
Through these actions, the therapist addressed the person who was still there, although he no longer served in the police. He still possessed abilities and habits acquired over a lifetime, and a readiness to act. They could be reconnected with the way he lived now.
The point of Neptune's work here is to give the person back to himself. In this reading, Erickson uses discipline to restore the possibility of living as a whole person. The individual assignments become a path toward that return.
This is our interpretation of the therapeutic work; the story itself does not provide a detailed report on the patient's recovery.
In this example, the whole is the person himself, and discipline is one aspect of the life he has developed. The whole need not be something beyond the individual: a person is also larger than a single habit, skill, or job. We change the scale of our examination while keeping the same question about part and whole. Erickson helps a surviving capacity find a place in the patient's present life. He does not need to return him to the police to do this.
Marina's similar concern is directed toward music. She helps pass on the retiring teacher's discoveries that made children enthusiastic and eager to play. In both cases, the question is which life we are helping to continue by finding renewed uses for particular habits and abilities.
The student takes the stage
Marina herself also went through a change like this. After an injury, her former concert workload became too demanding. She could still manage a single evening, but could no longer perform regularly as she had before.
Her stage experience remained. She knows how to prepare for an entrance, begin after the silence, manage nerves, and keep playing after a mistake.
Before his first concert, a student rushes to begin, stumbles, and stops. Marina helps him walk on calmly, settle at the instrument, and wait before the first sound. They run through the whole performance several times before a small audience and practice continuing after a slip.
She wants the encounter with an audience to begin an engaging musical life for him: to let him share what he has prepared and want to perform again.
At the concert, the student sits at the piano. Marina listens and hears him manage the things they worked through together. Her experience now helps someone else bring music to an audience.
When change has already begun, take the lead
There is a familiar idea: the best way to deal with someone else's initiative is to lead it yourself.
It can involve the same calculation as Tancredi's. A leader supports an innovation to preserve their influence. Behind the new undertaking, the old struggle for position continues.
It can also mean genuinely participating in something whose time has come.
Imagine teenagers at Marina's school wanting to put on a concert of music from films and video games. Several teachers object: that music is not in the school curriculum. The students start arranging a performance outside the school.
Marina recognizes the desire to play and share music. It is precisely what she has tried to encourage in lessons. Now it has led the children to pieces the teachers had not planned to teach.
She proposes preparing the concert together. Students choose the music; teachers help find scores, make manageable arrangements, and form ensembles. Rehearsal time is set aside for the project.
The children work willingly. They learn to hear their partners, maintain a tempo, work through difficult passages, and take responsibility for a shared performance. Their enthusiasm for music continues to grow within the school.
Marina took the lead because she recognized in the initiative something she herself wanted to bring to life. Changing the repertoire helped preserve that connection. She supported the undertaking and put in the work needed to make the concert happen.
Here too, it is useful to ask: what exactly do we want to carry forward when we take charge of change?
While there is still time to prepare
Passing on experience is easily postponed until there is no time left. Marina attends to the future of the music lessons while she can still work with her colleague to show new teachers how to engage children.
While her senior colleague is still teaching, they can observe how she draws children in. While the teenagers are still talking to the school about their concert, the school can join their project. While Marina's stage experience is needed by her students, she can give it new work to do.
Continuation does not require everyone to resemble their predecessors. The new teacher will find different pieces. The student will play differently on stage. The teenagers will propose their own program.
The music will sound different. Marina helps ensure that people still want to take part in it.
You can only sow what you live by
Scorpio’s opposite is Taurus, where Neptune has a different task. In Taurus, a master passes on what matters in their work, and it becomes part of other people’s lives. The Hierophant sows what is valuable in people’s souls and lives.
The axis closes simply. To sow something valuable, it must truly be alive in your own life. The Russian words for “whole” and “valuable” almost share a root, and what is passed on is what a person lives by, not words about it.
This is not just the Hierophant as a teacher of faith. It is true of any master in any work. If you do well what you teach, you teach well. Marina can pass on the ability to kindle enthusiasm for music because she lives by it herself. She does not describe it; she keeps teaching that way with the new teacher beside her. A cook passes on the flavour they seek because they seek it every day. Otherwise, there is nothing to pass on.
The reverse is familiar too. Someone teaches values they do not live by: the position is there, the words are correct, the forms observed, but nothing is alive. A form without a current, a riverbed without water. What is sown that day does not sprout, and inattentive listeners are not the reason.
Caring for the life of the whole is therefore a condition of transmission, not preparation for it. In Scorpio, we sustain it so it lives; in Taurus, we sow it further. Neither works without the other. There is nothing to sow if it is not alive in you, and no point in preserving it if it passes to no one.
Why the sower has something to sow
Ask directly: why does the Hierophant have anything to sow at all? Because what is valuable lives within him. It lives, and bears fruit. It flowers, fruits, and its fruit is then sown.
That is how a tree grows: it sows the ground around it because it lives, not because it tries hard. Seeds are not something it manufactures separately from its life, but how that life completes its cycle. A dead tree will sow nothing around itself, however much you ask.
Everything follows from this. To sow, you must live by what you want to sow.
The circle of transmission
The axis continues at the other end. What has been sown begins to live in the recipient, and Scorpio goes to work there again. What is valuable is now sustained in that person’s life: it acts and helps, rather than lying there as knowledge. Once it lives and works in them, they can pass it on, and the Hierophant goes to work again.
That is how transmission continues. The new teacher to whom Marina passed on the ability to kindle enthusiasm first lives it: teaches their own lessons, finds their own pieces, sees children drawn to the instrument. Then one day they show the next person. Marina once received the same thing from someone, and likewise lived it rather than retelling it.
Here we can see what reproducibility means. It comes about when what you reproduce lives and works within you. It must live and work for you to have something to pass on, and we pass it on so it can keep living and working. The same thing is both the foundation and the goal. The method is the Hierophant’s sowing.
This explains the usual mistake when passing work on. People search for it in the method: how to explain, what to write down, which manual to prepare. But method is the last link. If it has stopped living in you, no method can pass anything on. If it lives, even a poor explanation can transmit it, because someone beside you can see it working.
What psychology calls it
Erik Erikson has a name for this circle of transmission. He called the seventh of his eight life stages generativity: the need to pass on to those who follow what one has lived by. Its opposite is stagnation: a person continues their work, but it goes no further than them. Erikson described this as a task of mature adulthood. Here we can see that age is not the issue. Generativity is Scorpio and Taurus with the axis closed: what lives within you bears fruit, and the fruit is sown. Stagnation occurs when one half falls away: it either stops living or stops being passed on.
Carl Rogers called the condition without which transmission fails — passing on what you live by — congruence. See Taurus.
What psychology does about this, and what the axis adds, is explored in Six Problems That Already Have a Plan.
What do we want to see in the next chapter?
It is possible to change a great deal without understanding why. It is possible to cling to a familiar schedule while interest gradually drains out of the lessons.
In all these stories, we can see which life the concrete actions support. With Erickson, we speak of restoring a person's wholeness: through the discipline that remains, the therapist helps him become himself again. With Marina, it is musical life. She recognizes that life in children's enthusiasm, in the wish to play together, and in a first performance for an audience. She works to ensure that these things keep happening—with new teachers, different pieces, and the next students.
Her care becomes practical work: shared lessons, conversations about discoveries, concert preparation. That is how the ability to inspire enthusiasm gains a future.
Teachers and lessons change, yet children keep discovering music—because Marina helped pass on and develop what made those lessons alive.
Neptune in Scorpio — sustaining what allows something larger to live through the work at hand.
What, among the things alive here now, do we want to see in the next chapter?
In Pisces, we look at the person’s own participation and contribution—the student in the ensemble, Marina beside him. In Scorpio, Marina makes sure that another person’s gift does not leave the school when that person does. In Capricorn, we consider Marina’s position as founder and her responsibility for the school’s place in the musical life of the town.
Overview of all six axes: Neptune: Eternal Contexts.