Sometimes we tend to lump all states ‘not conscious’ into one category; after all, if we’re not aware of them, what’s the difference? True, to some extent, and in some situations the concepts are interchangeable, though when we look closely, we notice some potentially big variations between the unconscious (Moon) and subconscious (Neptune).

I like to sort it out by thinking of the subconscious as containing material that’s close to retrieval, that in fact may have been gained consciously, or at least during a conscious state, and then stored, ignored, or ‘forgotten.’ These are things that motivate us, often with the (subconscious) intent of bringing the information or connection to the surface of the mind. Neptune represents this form of information storage; think of a wall shrouded by fog–that wall is plenty real when we run into it! And no less solid just because we can’t see it. If we ‘feel around’ we may find and identify the wall before it becomes a problem. We access it in dreams, reveries, creative and imaginative activities, and in the Collective emotional atmosphere; with the latter element we feel it in the air all around us. It’s the tenor of the times, showing us things about ourselves via a mechanism where our attention is drawn to those external items and incidents that are also part of our own internal state. This is the way we use the idea that ‘We are the Collective, and the Collective is Us.’

With what’s unconscious, we are, for all practical purposes, disassociated from the material. It’s a ‘What, me?’ mindset, one that can be the source of very strong (and basic) motivations, but which carries no obvious connection to the thoughts or the life, at least for the individual; onlookers may see the patterns that spring from unconscious material quite clearly, however. It seems that what we cannot, for whatever reason, cradle consciously within the emotional reality, we must place in that portion of the Moon that contains the unconscious, a psychic version of the physics axiom that energy is never lost, it just changes form. In this case it disappears, but it’s influence is felt, though camouflaged in such a way that we do not recognize ourselves as the source. This information is difficult to access, only because there are usually reasons of Self-protection and need for a sense of psychic or mental/ emotional safety that caused us to place these perceptions where we did in the first place.

We can gain insight into the Moon’s unconscious aspects through the energies it aspects in the natal chart and its placement, through those who perform a Lunar function for us, or for whom we serve this function, in the matters of the House with Cancer on the cusp, and in some functions of the planets and points associated with Cancer in the chart. We might also, in a very subtle way, get a glimpse of this material just by looking below the horizon of the horoscope; this shows us what energies we may be more identified with, or that we may keep as assumptions about ourselves, and in this way they can link to either the subconscious of Neptune or the unconscious of the Moon.

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