The Neptunian personality
The Neptunian personality type is sensitive, compassionate, and romantic.
Neptunians are compassionate, empathic, sensitive and imaginative. Neptunians are by nature very malleable, flowy, and with rather porous boundaries (if any at all).
When the Plutonian would view the world through a lens of - how can I achieve power and control, the Neptunian views the world through a lens of - How can I merge with others?
This desire and yearning for merging is very typical of Neptunian energy and can be incredibly blissful and romantic, or toxic and dangerous. The Neptunian has a natural tendency to emote and experience empathy and sympathy. The Neptunian will naturally feel other people's energy, but even perhaps absorb it.
A lot of Neptunian qualify as HSP (highly sensitive personality) and have a tendency to feel much more deeply than most.
Main characteristics of the Neptunian personality
Immaterial
The Neptunian is particularly prone to the conception of projection and can choose a target (usually a romantic partner, but sometimes a cause or a celebrity crush) to project their feelings on. The Neptunian has a lot of feelings, a lot of love to give, and the Neptunian will tend to choose people, objects, causes, so that their immaterial love can take a physical form.
The Neptunian by definition lives in a very immaterial realm: Emotions, feelings, vibes, psychic energy; are what the Neptunian is primarily made of and they can experience a feeling of lacking grounding, anchoring, feeling like they're floating around, with no past and no future; like a ghost. If you're Neptunian, this image is probably quite striking to you and something you experience on and off.
A soft creature
The Neptunian's gift is its ability to emote and feel, its ability to experience unconditional love and acceptance, its ability to forgive and its ability to see the good in everyone and everything. The Neptunian is divine energy waiting to be unpacked, but more often than not, the Neptunian suffers from delusions and fantasies.
The Neptunian is an unusually soft and kind creature, but one that tends to fawn in the face of threats. Such a sensitive person tends to choose escape when faced with the harshness and ugliness of reality. This escape can be physical - like walking away from a situation, but more often than not, the Neptunian escape is actually mental: "This can't hurt me if I pretend it doesn't exist". When faced with tremendous pain, the Neptunian will take reality and repaint it in a different colour. It's not something conscious, more so a subconscious mechanism the Neptunian learned to adopt when coping with a yearning for something they were not receiving.
Lack of grounding
The Neptunian can find it hard to stay grounded in reality, and can easily fall in victim roles, unable to see their participation in their turmoil. As the Neptunian's go-to mechanism is sublimating, idealizing, escaping in fantasies, it can be difficult for the Neptunian to see things as they are, brutally and honestly, and that goes for how their environment/other people act, but also for their own participation in their turmoil. The Neptunian tends to fall in a pattern of being either the victim, the martyr, or the rescuer.
Selflessness
Negatively, the Neptunian prone to codependent relationships, where there is little space between how their partner feels, how they feel, where there is little accountability, a desire to rescue/be rescued, and an inability to uphold boundaries. This is most definitely the core of the Neptunian struggle and a pattern they tend to repeat over and over until they learn how to express their energy with more grace.
The Neptunian has a strong tendency to put themselves last, finds it hard to set (if even knows about) boundaries, and tends to attract people who take, while their natural inclination is to give.
Yearning
The Neptunian is seeking merging and will merge every chance they get. It leaves them exposed to all sorts of pitfalls, but the Neptunian will try, time and time again. The Neptunian might try to merge with a divinity, with an art form, with nature, or with other people. The yearning for connection and sublimation isn't necessarily a problem, but only if/when the Neptunian learns how to do so within a healthy container. Neptunians are the most romantic of all personality types and when they are able to find a sense of healthy self, healthy boundaries, healthy expectations, they can be the most loving, gentle, and altruistic. They often find the need to "redeem" themselves, even in the absence of "sin", and often are found in activities such as fundraising, volunteering, and social work in general.
As is true for everything, polarity makes it so that the Neptunian greatest struggle is also their greatest strength. The Neptunian naturally lacks boundaries and is porous, allowing them to be the personality type that is the most sensitive, able to feel everything, emote easily, and also the most psychic, as they lack the perception of the boundaries separating individuals. They're absolutely fantastic at picking up on subtle cues, non-verbal language, and shifts in emotions.
Example of a famous Neptunian: Charles Bukowski
When I think of Neptunian energy, the first thing that pops into my head is Charles Bukowski. I think in my mind he's the representative of Neptunian energy. n
Let's take a look at his Neptunian placements:
- Neptune square Ascendant
- Neptune conjunct Mercury
- Neptune conjunct Sun (the orb is a bit wide but we can take it as it's a stellium)
- Neptune square Mars
Prolific author, incredibly poet, and lifelong alcoholic, Charles Bukowski hits all the marks for Neptunian manifestations.
What to do from here:
Check out my recommended books for Neptunian personality types
Check out my blog posts here and here about determining your personality type
Check out my courses to learn how to read a birth chart in-depth and understand personality types at a glance
See also
Martian personality type