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The Sun square Neptune

the Sun square Neptune, within one nativity or between two charts in synastry

What the tradition reads

Within a single chart the Sun square Neptune is read as an internal conflict between wanting something extraordinary and struggling to settle on a clear sense of self. The tradition describes natives as daydreamers prone to placing trust in unsuitable people, often carrying a glorified but distorted image of a parent, and drawn, in the effort to feel special, toward escapist patterns the astrologers name plainly as a risk of this placement rather than a virtue of it. Delineators note that where Mercury and Saturn stand more solidly elsewhere in the chart, the same square shows up in a milder, less disorienting form. Between two charts, one person's Sun square another's Neptune is read as a hard aspect in which the Sun person idealizes the Neptune person past what the relationship can actually sustain: sources describe a mistrust that eventually surfaces, sometimes swinging the Sun person's view of the Neptune person from wholly wonderful to wholly untrustworthy without much room left in between.

The story

A square sets two bodies ninety degrees apart, a quarter of the circle; Ptolemy's chapter on the mutual configuration of the signs names it, together with the opposition, discordant, since the signs it joins are, in his words, of different natures and sexes, a strong and unavoidably felt tension regardless of which two bodies stand in it. Neptune's myth, given to a planet the ancients never tracked, is Poseidon's sea: one of three brothers who divided the cosmos between them, ruling water that gives abundance freely and just as freely destroys, never holding one fixed shape for long. Squared against the Sun, the chart's own fixed point of identity, the sea god's planet will not simply cooperate; it presses the self to define itself against a domain that keeps shifting under it, the old sailors' fear of losing all bearings at sea offering the square its clearest, oldest image.

Written from

Corpus key aspect:Sun:Neptune:square.