Neptune Square the Midheaven—How It Affects your Career

©2007 by Donna Cunningham, MSW

 Note: This is an excerpt from a longer exploration of aspects to the Midheaven in my ebook, Outer Planets as Career Indicators, which can be purchased  at moonmavenpublications.com. 

Aspects to the Midheaven show various ways the career must integrate the needs, urges, and qualities of a particular planet. Any given chart may have several planets aspecting the Midheaven, each adding to or detracting from the complex life task of finding the right vocation. 

Let’s look at some aspects to the Midheaven by Neptune, which represents creativity, spirituality, and the desire to serve—much-needed qualities in an economy that lacks compassion and is increasingly driven by the bottom line. Still, these uplifting facets of Neptune—when pursued without wisdom, common sense, and a capacity for coping with reality—can also represent career sabotage through self-deception or becoming the victim/martyr type.  Elusive and shape-shifting, Neptune has effects that are hard to describe succinctly, but Neptune can square the Midheaven from four different houses, and each of these squares shows a different sort of tension between matters of that house and worldly success. (The celebrities whose names are in parentheses are examples of these placements found in AstroDataBank.) Squares can represent difficulties, yet the long list of famous folk with outer planet squares to the Midheaven demonstrates that such conflicts are not insurmountable. In fact, people with hard aspects are often more driven to succeed than those with softer aspects, who may find that things come so easily that there is no particular urgency or challenge.

 Neptune in the 1^st square the Midheaven: The appearance of these people and the dreamy, spacey, impractical, and soft-edged image they project can impede success in a highly competitive corporate field, but serve well in a more artistic one. These people may be glamorous (Geena Davis, Claudia Schiffer), and yet their beauty may place them in the limelight to an uncomfortable degree. The 1^st being one of the health houses, Neptune here may represent some physical fragility or challenge that could detract from a physically-demanding career (Stevie Wonder) or an addiction that cannot be ignored (Bill Clinton’s sexual addiction).

 Neptune in the 12^th square the Midheaven: Neptune’s energy is similar to that of the 12^th, so the wish to withdraw or escape from the mundane world can create a private, even reclusive individual, (Harrison Ford) and so a high-focus career is less likely than a quiet, contemplative one. Addictions or unconscious emotions and motivations may sabotage career goals, as may secrets. (With this position, however, gossip columnist Rona Barrett was a huge success ferreting out others’ secrets.) The 12^th is well suited for fields involving service, spirituality (Della Reese) and for creative arts like writing and painting that do not require meeting the public. There may also be some sort of cause or ideal that the person puts above material success (1960’s activist, Jerry Rubin).

 Neptune in the 7^th square the Midheaven: Especially with Neptune in Libra or Scorpio, the partner’s needs are placed before the native’s own goals. Where the partner suffers from an addiction or serious mental or physical illness, codependency can drain energy from the native’s work-related efforts. A partner suffering from low self-esteem can subtly sabotage the native’s career. In other cases, the native may be so overawed by the partner’s gifts that he or she does not feel worthy of a career, becoming a support person instead. Since business partnerships show up in the seventh house as well, this placement is a red warning light, for business partners could prove to be unreliable, deceptive, or dysfunctional in ways that could sabotage the success of the business.

 Neptune in the 6^th square the Midheaven: Spaced-out, disorganized, inconsistent work habits and escape into daydreams can keep these people from setting and meeting realistic goals.  Feeling—and playing—the victim can prevent them from being authorities in their own right; instead they may act like doormats. This placement is superb for service work, but the natives may become compulsive rescuers and martyrs to a cause, thus sacrificing their health. When work doesn’t match their vision of a life purpose (most likely a creative or spiritual one), they might fall ill as a way of forcing a change.

  To give another example, one of Pluto’s emotional triggers is the use and abuse of power, and so Pluto in the 7^th square the Midheaven might show a romantic or business partner whose need to dominate and control may come to the fore when the native begins to enjoy success. Whatever the aspect to the Midheaven, Plutonians can become enmeshed in relationships that seduce them away from focusing on their life work.  For instance, a Pluto opposition to the Midheaven may show that even in adulthood, the person can be involved in murky family relationships—especially those with parents—which sabotage their career progress. They might work in a family business where they are not paid the kind of salary they might get in an outside company, but they are manipulated into staying by guilty trips and the not-so-subtle message that they couldn’t survive alone. 

 Note: This is an excerpt from a longer exploration of aspects to the Midheaven in my ebook, Outer Planets as Career Indicators, which can be purchased  at moonmavenpublications.com.  Download a sampler here: Sampler–2015 OPIL1   

More Posts about Vocational Astrology on this Blog: 

• Uranus In The Career Houses—“You’re Not The Boss Of Me!”
• Pluto in the Career Houses–The Power to Manifest or Fail for Spite
• Vocational Angst for the Pluto-Uranus in Virgo Generation
• Life Patterns of People Born with Uranus-Saturn Aspects
• Saturn Transits—What do They Mean to your Career?
• Transits to the Vocational Houses–Temp Job or Career Departure?

More Posts about Neptune on this Blog:

• How Strong is your Neptune? Here’s the Score!
• 22 Articles about Neptune on Skywriter
• Relationship Patterns of Venus-Neptune Aspects: The Sociology of Thrice-Married Venusians
• Neptune and the Cosmic Soup
• Difficult Neptune Aspects in Chart Comparison
• Addicted to Anguish–a Sketch of one Neptunian Type
• Neptune in the 11th House–Setting Boundaries in Friendship

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