The Moon wants the actual house, the actual meal, the actual person who turns up. Neptune wants the house as it should have been. Squared, the two keep substituting for one another, and the native grows up with a home life that is remembered better or worse than it was but rarely as it was. A parent is idealised, or dissolved into a haze, and the facts are recovered late and with difficulty. Disappointment is therefore chronic rather than occasional, since reality is being measured against something no household could supply.
The friction is visible in small evasions. Asked what is wrong, the native says nothing is wrong and believes it for an hour. Conflict is avoided by going absent while still in the room. Promises are made warmly and kept unevenly, not from indifference but because the warmth at the moment of promising felt like the keeping of it. Lovers and dependants are chosen for their need, then resented for having it. Food, drink and spending drift when the native is unhappy, and the drift is noticed by others first.
This square makes better people than it makes comfortable ones. What it forces, over years, is the distinction between compassion and self erasure, and nobody with an easy Neptune ever has to learn it. The native who begins telling the small truth at the moment it is true, rather than the kind version an hour later, finds that the fog thins considerably. The imagination is not the problem and should not be sacrificed. It is simply that it must be given somewhere honest to go, or it will go into the marriage and the accounts.
What It Gives
- ◆kindness toward the difficult
- ◆imagination with real reach
- ◆forgiveness that costs something
- ◆hard won emotional honesty
What It Costs
- ◆chronic disappointment in the home
- ◆conflict avoided by going absent
- ◆self erasure sold as devotion
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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