When you think about aspects between Uranus and the Moon you have to keep in mind that these two bodies are the most changeable fixtures in the solar system. Uranus is basically out of control and the Moon moves a degree every two hours, so any aspect they form is flavored by those factors. Any astrologer you talk to will have a lot to say about what they do when they hook up. The hard aspects are so interesting that you never know how they're going to manifest in a person's life, and they produce background energies that shake, disturb, and upset the sense of balance and security both inwardly and outwardly. It's hard to pin down or be definitive about what they do. Soft aspects between Uranus and the Moon lend a remarkable ability to ADAPT to change whenever necessary. What they tell me is that the native may get caught up in the kinds of emotional turmoil that all of us fall victim to, but they know how to manage it better. They also know how to shift their emotional perspective and adjust to change creatively, so there is much less upheaval whenever the s--- hits the fan. Finding new ways to respond to life, instead of clinging tightly to the same old groove, is a wonderful quality to be blessed with. Easy Uranus-Moon aspects sometimes suggest that the client has unique and rewarding relationships with their children and/or their mothers. And, for the most part, they can approach all their emotionally based relationships with fewer expectations. There's an ability to be close to others without getting strangled by the umbilical cord, the apron strings, or the developmental issues.
What about Neptune and the Moon in hard aspect? Think of Neptune as nebulous, confused, and overly idealistic, and then consider the Moon as emotion, the past, Mother, security, etc. In a stressful configuration this will create a sense of not knowing what you feel, not feeling grounded in a strong security base, and not having a clear identification with the mother or the past. Noel Tyl says that wherever Neptune is, things are "not what they seem" to be, and Liz Greene says that it creates a "longing" for something that never existed. I have found both of these perspectives to be true in practice, so if you're interpreting charts, they offer immediate clues to guide you toward a more in depth analysis. It's a general rule that even the issues governed by the House that Neptune occupies are "other" than they seem to be. My immediate feeling when I see any hard Neptune-Moon aspect is that there is a deep longing for the "Mother energy" that has never been satisfied. This can mean that Mom isn't there at some level or that the client is in denial about where the mother was coming from. It's as if the whole maternal issue is something that the native isn't being honest about and can't see clearly. People with these aspects can also feel victimized by the mother's behavior, as in alcoholic, or emotionally immature behavior on her part that disappoints the native. If you start with MOM and what she represents, there are so many other threads that fan out from that matrix. What we are supposed to receive from her should ostensibly provide us with a sense of inner safety, but if she's a nebulous influence, the whole security base is very shaky and clouded. This means that the real feelings aren't clearly understood. If you never know what you're feeling it's difficult to act in ways that support you in the world because everything emanates from that inner sensing of being centered and safe. These contacts can also create a longing for "Home". This longing causes a person to want to find their way back to a place where everything is as it should be. But when something never existed in the first place, how do you find your way back to it? Because the sense of what "Home" actually means is often distorted by a lot of gossamer dreams and taking that journey can bring you down a lot of blind alleys. Gossamer dreams, in reality, are often cobwebs. The trick to connecting with whatever the idealistic dreams represent involves brushing away the cobwebs that have formed around the skeletons that were buried long before you know what they were. As far as the past goes, Neptune-Moon aspects idealize whatever took place and if they don't idealize it they function as the excuse to explain why nothing ever comes together for a person. For all of us it's true that you can "never go back", but when Neptune hits the Moon the wrong ways there's nothing to go back to, no memory of anything safe. It's a real bummer! To deal with these influences constructively, a tremendous amount of soul-searching needs to occur. It becomes imperative for anyone with hard Neptune-Moon stuff to look hard and long at whatever the truth is. This isn't easy because if you're born with these contacts the last thing you want to do is face it. It may be more accurate to say that the "equipment" that allows you to see it was never installed, and ultimately, because it wasn't built in, the native has to build it themselves. The desire to do so is born out of repeated disappointments that collectively cause a person to finally look at what they don't want to see or feel squarely in the eye. When Neptune and the Moon form soft aspects, everything that relates to Mom, security, "Home", and the past is uplifted or infused with a force that causes the native to understand themselves a little better spiritually because of it. The connection to all of that stuff that people with hard aspects long for is something that soft Neptune-Moon people ACTUALLY EXPERIENCED! Believe it or not SOME people actually have a deep sense of closeness within the family and as far as the past goes, for them things couldn't have been better. Being cradled in the arms of a loving mother, really being loved and cared about, really KNOWING what these experiences feel like and having them encoded in your cellular memory......WOW! Imagine what that does for a person in terms of making it easier. Because these patterns were installed, these people have a deep sense of connection to life. And it allows them to be emotionally receptive to everything. It also makes them emotionally generous and compassionate. The old books all say it creates a love of animals, and I have found this to be true. Women that take in stray cats and dogs always have Neptune and the Moon smiling at each other. Basically, easy Neptune-Moon stuff creates feeling levels that are pretty pure. And not only do these people know what they're feeling, the intuition is so sound it enables them to imagine and dream in ways that ATTRACT whatever they're dreaming about. The only problem with having good Neptune-Moon aspects is that they lend themselves to the whole idea of being taken advantage of by others. It stands to reason. When you're this nice, people use you.
So let's look at what Uranus and Mercury do when they form tough aspects. Mercury rules the way we think and it governs our basic attitude. The way we think has so much to say about what we're able to manifest. It really pays to study Mercury aspects. With the crazy, unpredictable, out of the ordinary energy of Uranus zapping Mercury the hard way, what comes up right off the bat is an off the wall attitude. This means a lot of weird ideas that don't get a person very far because they run counter to whatever the collective mind set approves of. Fanaticism can be an issue. Uranus has a tendency to be very willful and if the mental faculties are being affected in this way, the mind becomes attached to its eccentricity and pushes it to the limit. Have you ever run into people who are so quirky, everything they do is governed by their quirkiness? There is also a spastic element that Uranus can generate. This makes it hard for the mind to focus on anything. At the biochemical level, Uranus-Mercury contacts can cause the neurons in the brain to fire off so quickly that the native jumps mentally from one thing to another and not necessarily in an orderly way. Dyslexia, ADD, and conditions of this nature can result. If there are heavy-duty asteroids involved in hard Uranus-Mercury aspects it can make a person insane, literally. When you interpret charts everything is relative. And you have to be able to see to what extreme things are going. There's a big difference between being a likeable nutcase and legally insane. Because Mercury rules siblings and the immediate environment during the adolescent period, hard aspects from Uranus can suggest that the brothers or sisters were a source of disruption or that there was no bonding there. Keep in mind, Uranus rules separations and sometimes these aspects point to an actual separation between the native and their siblings. If we apply this train of thought to the forces affecting the adolescent period, what comes to mind is that maybe things were in a total uproar. You could say, "So what if they were?" But again, everything is relative and, depending on the individual, if all Hell is breaking loose between the ages of 7 and 13 it can create all kinds of imbalances later on. My ex-stepson has a Uranus-Mercury opposition and when he was a kid his Mom was a junkie and his Dad was a crazy alcoholic. They were separated and he lived with his Mom and his sisters along with whoever else was crashing on the floor of her apartment. His everyday life was a total zoo. NO ONE ever looked out for this little boy, so he ran around town and did what he wanted. He was hopping trains to Boston by the time he was 6 years old. ( A very Uranus-Mercury activity, by the way. Mercury rules all forms of transportation.) He is a text-book example of every sort of learning disorder and at 22 still can't read beyond a third grade level. This is an EXTREME case, but extreme cases give the astrologer so much information about what the planets are really capable of doing. Don't start freaking out if you have hard Uranus-Mercury aspects! At the less addled end of the spectrum all they do is make your thought patterns more "eclectic". When you don't think the way other people think, life isn't impossible. But you have to be able to see that your mind and your decision making processes need to slide over to the right a little more, or at least somewhere near the middle. The other way these contacts surface is through the creation of everyday circumstances where there is too much happening at once all the time. In the normal, every day activities there is so much random interference that nothing happens in a straight line. They CAN create an accident-prone force and you will notice this crop up with people who are always falling down, having fender benders, or having unusual accidents that don't fall into any particular category. This could be because stressed out Uranus-Mercury energy makes the brain run in the fast lane. When the mind is hyperventilating anything can happen. At the very least, it can make it very hard to stay on one subject for very long.
So what about GOOD Uranus-Mercury aspects? These are great to have. What they do is make the person's mind very open to new information. People with these aspects want to know everything and they usually are willing to go into areas of thought that haven't been actively explored before. They are gifted with the ability to change their ingrained approach to things whenever situations call for it. This makes it very easy to adapt to anyone and anything. It's a wonderful gift to be able to embrace any and all ways of thinking. Life is so much more fun when you don't have a problem seeing all points of view. Scientists and inventors have these aspects. For the world to keep spinning, SOMEONE has to be able to come up with new ideas. When Uranus lets out all the stops on what it's possible for the mind to consider, new territory gets opened up. Because Mercury rules the small motor skills and relates to the way the brain transmits information to the nerves and the muscles at the physical level, harmonious Uranus-Mercury connections create unusual kinds of coordination. We all remember kids on the school bus who were proud of being double-jointed and the ones who could touch their tongues to their noses. It's Uranus-Mercury. And those women in strip bars who do amazing tricks with cigarettes and hard-boiled eggs have Uranus and Mercury happily configured. Contortionists and extreme yoga people do, too. These are really off the wall examples, but I use them to illustrate how far aspects range and how deeply they're rooted in the fabric of our lives. People who poo poo astrology have no clue. If they studied it at all they would know better. It enters into everything.
Now let's look at what Neptune and Mercury do when they're in conflict. The Mercury element is logical. Neptune is totally illogical. Mercury needs to have everything make sense and Neptune doesn't even know what that means. It's sort of like Uranus and the Moon; they're totally opposite forces. The mind, which is Mercury, functions like a computer. Everything in the mind has circuits that connect everything in an orderly fashion to everything else. Neptune is the higher spiritual centers which are totally OUTSIDE of the mind. It is the intuitive-psychic force. It's common knowledge that we only use ten percent of our mental capacity. Mercury rules that ten percent. Neptune rules the ninety percent that is undeveloped. What I'm getting at is that these two planets are not even on the same frequency. And in hard aspect there's absolutely no communication between them. So what does this mean? Right off the bat it's clear that the logical mind wouldn't be getting constructive feedback from the intuition. Or, a person could have incredible hunches and be moved to act in an intuitive way but the mental apparatus would argue the point. Another way to look at this would be to see that maybe part of you wants to open up to your higher self and to things of a spiritual nature but your mind can't allow you to go there because it needs to have everything be cut and dried. So there's a conflict between what you have the capacity to imagine and how far you're willing to go in that direction. In some charts, the Mercury element will show up as the wet blanket that squelches the faith in higher things. In others, Neptune clouds and confuses the mental capacity. There are many ways this can manifest. Have you ever had dealings with people who don't know what they think or where they stand on anything? They're wishy-washy and vague. Whenever you ask them anything "they don't know" what they want. Because Neptune tends to "GLAMORIZE" things, the factual information that Mercury assimilates gets dressed up. The old books say that hard Neptune-Mercury aspects create the tendency to lie, cheat and steal. After all, mythologically, Mercury was a thief. I've known a few thieves and guess what? They all have hard Neptune-Mercury stuff.
Cal Garrison (a.k.a. "Mother of the Skye") has been doing Horoscopes, writing about astrology, and reading Tarot since 1972. She studied astrology with Charles and Vivia Jayne in the early 70's. Cal does private readings and writes for several newspapers and magazines. She wrote The Old Girl's Book of Spells and The Old Girls' Book of Dreams: How to Make Your Wishes Come True Day by Day and Night by Night