The remarks to which duty forced us when on the subject of Venus and Neptune must be made even more severe if we are to deal adequately with his relations with the Moon. For Venus has a certain ease and jollity; the Moon is cold, dim, mother of illusions. She is utterly dark, unless the Sun himself lend her of his light. Alone she is but the planet of witches; strange beasts prowl in the darkness; poisoners gather their deadly herbs beneath her as she wanes. Neptune, too, is an ‘octave’ of Luna; so that in combination they bring the maximum deviation from balance; and all unbalanced force is evil. We accordingly find an excessive weakness and effeminacy, expressing itself in peevish melancholy, often associated with ill-health, and with addiction to drugs and drink. The strong characters, the great men, who have these planets in aspect have them either unimportant as in the case of Wagner, who has them sextile, but has the Sun rising (on the exact cusp of the Ascendant) trine Mars sextile Jupiter, semi-sextile Mercury, an array which utterly outshines them – or assisted by some masculine benefic. Thus Shakespeare’s semi-sextile is also a semi-sextile with Sol; Erasmus has Sol as well as Luna in conjunction;· Zola has Sol and Luna conjoined sextile, as well as aspects of Venus and Jupiter; Chopin’s sextile is fortified by Mars and the Sun; Philip Bourke Marston’s opposition is also an opposition to Mercury, and besides he had the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter as the dominant factor in his horoscope. Wilhelm II has a trine of the Moon, whence his physical misfortune,- and his weak love of peace; fortunately Mars conjoined with Neptune in the tenth kept that weakness from becoming criminal.
George Eliot has the two planets semi-sextile; hence the ultra-femininity of her nature and her wish to masquerade as masculine. The Emperor Franz Joseph has them square; his life has been a tragedy too great for tears. Robert Louis Stevenson has them in conjunction; there is a typical case- the frail, anaemic, delicate, refined, wistful, gentle creature utterly unfitted by his personality to fight in the world and only saved by Venus on the cusp of the eleventh, implying help of friends (she is trined by Uranus) from constant disaster. There is also a conjunction of Sol and Mars in the eighth (culminating) implying sudden and unexpected strength in hours of despair, but of course it killed him in the end. Saturn rising (second house) is more melancholy still, especially as he is within 2° of the opposition of Jupiter.
Dreyfus has the same aspect, a conjunction, and it made him the sport of a most evil fortune, despite the trine of Jupiter which could do no more than secure his ultimate rehabilitation. The trine aspect is again found with Guy de Maupassant and to this, no doubt, we may attribute his nervous subtlety. But he has Venus rising in conjunction with Jupiter and Mars, an overwhelming force of character to counteract the otherwise weakening effect.
As a final example, we have the notorious Mabel Collins, whose Neptune is not only in conjunction with the Moon, but trine Mars, square Venus and sextile to a conjunction of Saturn and Uranus. Such a hotch-potch of aspects is too confusing ever to be good. Hence her Neptune in the fifth, the house of pleasures and of art, ruined that part of her life. Her books were but medleys of mania, ill-written, pretentious and ignorant and her pleasures were unsavoury to the last degree.
To sum all, we may say that while the combinations of Neptune and Luna may be most fortunate in stimulating the imagination, in conferring subtlety and depth of thought, and in making the character pure, aspiring and gentle, this will rarely be the case unless in other respects the horoscope is unusually strong. So recondite and obscure a mode of thought as is implied will most assuredly suffer shipwreck from the storms of life unless the ship of the Soul be armoured with the triple brass and iron of some other planets better calculated to resist the buffeting of the waves of circumstance.