Mercury Neptune Aspects - Liars, Musicians, Actors, Writers

When Neptune touches Mercury in someone's birth chart by aspect - conjunction, opposition, square, trine, or sextile - there are no limits or boundaries to someone's mind and imagination.

This means that they are very creative, full of ideas, and have a vivid imagination, but - on the downside - they could also go as far as "inventing" a false reality by lying or living in a fantasy in their own heads.

Head in the clouds

Their mind frequently wanders to other realms, they space out and they have a hard time staying focused. Because they are quite absent-minded, there can be a lot of confusion, forgetfulness and misunderstandings.
They have a lot of semi-conscious thought processes. Like a radio, they constantly pick up on many channels but have a hard time tuning into just one clearly, without background noise.

They are usually very subjective and, at worst, have difficulties distinguishing fantasy from reality. Their mental processes and way of thinking are frequently naive, childlike and unrealistic.
They don't like accepting a mundane and logical explanation and long for a deeper more magical meaning, which is why they tend to dramatize things or connect a higher meaning to ordinary things ("that wasn't the wind, it was a ghost!").
That is why a lot of people with Mercury Neptune aspects are superstitious or gullible and easily conned - they want to buy into something unrealistic - it's more fascinating.

They often lack street smarts and common sense.

"Air heads"

Especially the hard aspects between Mercury and Neptune - the square and the opposition - but also the conjunction (if Mercury is placed badly in Pisces, Sagittarius, or Leo) lead to learning difficulties or disabilities.
Anything which follows rules or formulas - such as maths and spelling - is hard for them, but anything that leaves room for interpretation and creativity - such as art and creative writing - is their strength.
They are not detail-oriented and don't like accuracy and precision. Their thinking isn't linear and they often have a bad sense of direction.

Another problem with Mercury Neptune contacts is that it can give someone a hard time finding the right words to express their thoughts or to make a clear point. They stumble over their own words or need a lot of time to find the right expression.
Their minds aren't clear and straight-forward so they also struggle to know what their own opinion or stance on something is and to express that clearly.
Their minds may be like a sponge, absorbing other people's words and opinions. If there's a writer, speaker, or any person they idolize, they might just repeat their words like a parrot.
Very frequently, they adopt verbal quirks or "catchphrases" etc. of the people they spend a lot of time with.

Musicians, Actors, and Writers

As I already mentioned, Mercury Neptune aspects indicate great imagination and creativity.
Although this aspect also has to do with lying, one could say that fiction and acting are positive manifestations of lying.
Many great authors, actors, screenwriters and lyricists have this planetary combination - the square seems to be especially frequent among gifted musicians.
Neptune rules photography and movies, any type of manipulation or glamorization of reality, so these people could also be very skilled at photoshop and the like.
These people are able to channel the collective unconscious into music and stories. They also easily understand the messages their unconscious mind is trying to convey to them through their dreams and are good at interpreting other people's dreams too.

Some musicians with this aspect include David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Mozart, Jim Morrison (all have the square), Bono (opposition), Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj and Zayn Malik (conjunction).

As for the actors: Jim Carrey has the square, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, and Emma Watson have the trine, Drew Barrymore has the sextile (which is especially fitting since she also played a character with short-term memory loss in the movie 50 First Dates).

Since Neptune dissolves any boundaries, these people might have the opposite of writers block: they constantly have inspiration to write and the words flow out of them with a bottomless supply of ideas, feelings, fantasies, stories, and thoughts to put on paper. For some it might lead to oversharing - there is no "filter", so these people are a lot like children in that they may say a lot of nonsense sprinkled with hidden gems of wisdom.
So many great and succesful authors have this aspect, including Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King (conjunction), Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck (trine), Ernest Hemingway (sextile), Virginia Woolf (square), and C.S. Lewis (opposition).

During my research on Mercury Neptune aspects, I was amazed by how many of the greatest and most successful screenwriters have this aspect. Christopher Nolan has an almost exact square, David Lynch also has the square aspect, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have the sextile, Wes Anderson has the opposition - that's basically all the great screenwriters of our time, excluding Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino. But Woody Allen has a Sun Neptune square and Quentin Tarantino has a Moon Neptune opposition. So whenever there's a talent for coming up with stories, glamorizing reality and creating a fantasy, Neptune is definitely at play.

Advertisement, Journalism, and Propaganda

When Mercury and Neptune combine, there can be a distortion of the truth and it can show a talent for influencing other people and impressing ideas and thoughts onto their minds - in advertising, journalism, or newspaper reporting, for example.

A Mercury-Neptune aspect is great at leaving out anything which gets in the way of a well-rounded story and bending the facts so as to make the story more interesting or to match a certain agenda or make a certain point. This is great for journalism and newspaper reporting, especially for glamorous or scandalous tabloids or even propaganda. Perez Hilton has Mercury trine Neptune, for example, and he is one of the most well-known celebrity gossip bloggers.

This aspect also indicates a talent for advertising and selling, because somebody with a Mercury Neptune aspect can mold a product into whatever a customer wants and needs with their words.
A good Mercury/Neptune archetype or trope might be the snake oil salesman, somebody who sells a "cure-all miracle product" - basically someone who can talk you into buying useless crap and make you believe that it is exactly what you need.
If this isn't used for evil or egoistic purpose, this can of course be a great skill
Some people with this aspect are able to influence or inspire others through their speech - such as Vladimir Putin (conjunction), Donald Trump, or Abraham Lincoln (both have the square).

In school, especially those with sextiles and trines and also those with the conjunction can successfully ace presentations without preparation and "bullshit" their way through essays by making it sound like they know what they are talking about and like they have an important and very meaningful point to make. Likewise, in art class they might just create something randomly but then come up with some very inspiring "meaning" or "message" on the spot when asked to talk about their piece.

Advice and Reminders for Pluto Transits

Pluto transit periods are the autumns of our lives.

Everything seems to die and fall away.
We will only be dragged with it when we refuse to let go.

Pluto rules death, but it is not the physical death.
Death reminds us that everything we accumulate in life will be stripped away one day.
We leave this earth only with the things we came here with - our naked bodies.
Not even a sense of identity, definitely not any material possessions, no belief systems.
So it is with Pluto transits: they are like a death in the sense that everything we thought we needed and everything our ego held onto and defined as "ours" is stripped away from us.
It can be freeing in the sense that once we realize we can live without this stuff (be it money, people, faith, success, etc), we realize our true power - we don't really need anyone or anything to survive.
Then we can choose to invite something into our lives, not from the position of a beggar, controlled by and at the mercy of something, relying on it.
Instead, it is a free choice with the knowledge that we do not depend on it.

With Pluto transits, there is a feeling of having to start from scratch.

You won't die, your relationship doesn't have to end, you won't have to lose your job - but you can't come out of the Pluto transits without letting go of how you used to be, how the relationship dynamic used to work, etc.

Pluto is about evolution. The thing that doesn't work anymore, that doesn't serve you anymore has to be left behind.

The things that don't adapt during the Plutonian evolution won't survive.

Before a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, it turns into goo in the cocoon.
You have to become like this too, completely let go of control, have a near-death experience, be like goo, just allow life to happen, allow things to die off.
The caterpillar does survive technically, but in a completely different form. It's no longer a caterpillar, it's a butterfly. And this was only possible because it was willing to let the old self die. Everything survives Pluto transits, but in different forms.

"Don't grieve.

Anything you lose comes round in another form."

Rumi

When a person we love leaves us, love does not leave us. Because we are the source of it.
The love is in the person that loves, not in the one being loved.
So love can always come around in a different form. We are the source of love. We don't have to force love to stay alive in the form of a specific person or relationship or hobby or what have you - love is always there, somewhere.

Pluto is about realizing that the essence cannot die - which doesn't just relate to love.

We may have to find success and money through another career/job, we may have to find faith through another spiritual or religious path, we may have to find ourselves in another identity or style. But the essence never leaves us. In A Course in Miracles it says that "Nothing real can die" and Pluto is about learning to value the immortal essence of something more than the mortal shell.

People used to have animal sacrifice rituals because they saw in nature that whenever something dies something new can grow from these fertile grounds. Thats why, to make sure plants keep growing and animals keep reproducing, they would kill - death means life (paradoxically).
I think this is important in a metaphorical sense.
Whenever we feel stuck in life or as a person, we need to let something die so something new has a space to breathe and something to feed off of.
Thats what pluto teaches, to shed old skins, to be reborn like a phoenix, transform.
The motto of Pluto transits should be: don't force a dead thing to stay alive. Allow it to fertilize the grounds for something fresh.
The end of one thing is just the start of another thing.

"Pluto operates like a good parent or a wise spiritual master. He doesn’t engineer our suffering; our own confusion does that. It’s not the transit, but our resistance to it that creates the pain. We’re attached to something disempowering; it holds us back. The crucial part of Pluto’s interrogation is to identify “that which we hold most dear,” so we know what to relinquish. Initially we’re frightened it’s something external we must lose-a marriage, a child, our standing in the world. These may or may not disappear. But more often the real binkie we’re sucking on is some stupid notion that has been holding our limited world in place."

Dana Gerhardt 

Pluto transits are a time for getting rid of old beliefs and shells of personality like a snake shedding an old skin.
Getting rid of what no longer serves us, what has outlived its purpose, an evolution of the soul.
Celebrate the funeral of old beliefs and old ideas of who you are.
Get rid of the idea that something dying is bad.
The essence cannot die.

You can get a personal predictive reading by me here :)