The water signs – Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces – are the emotional trio of the zodiac. They’re energy often flow inwards. Intuitive, secretive, and sensitive to the undercurrents of life with a psychic antennae permanently raised, seeking out the unseen emotional tides. Now, the term “mute,” or even “dumb,” as used historically, sounds a bit blunt and insensitive to our modern ears. But in the context of old astrological books, it wasn’t meant to insult. It was more of an observational shorthand: crabs, scorpions, and fish don’t make a peep. They skitter, slither, and swim silently through the shadows, communicating with – dare I say- vibes. When Mercury is placed in a water sign, and especially if it’s squared off with Saturn or opposite Mars, astrologers once believed it could manifest as internalized speech. Difficulty expressing thoughts, a feeling of being misunderstood, or even a literal speech delay can show up, particularly in traditional astrological interpretations. But rather than calling it a deficiency, we might see it as a deepening of perception. These are the minds of feeling, too subtle for words.

It is the whole idea of “reptilian signs.” Don’t think of it in the David Icke, conspiratorial lizard-people sense, but in the sense of silent watchers, primal processors, creatures closer to the earth and the subconscious. The hiss of silence, in the language beneath language. Think of the Scorpion’s sting, silent but potent, or Pisces drifting through dreams, speaking in symbols.

It’s a curious thing, really, the idea of muteness. In one sense, it conjures the image of creatures unable, or perhaps unwilling, to shout above the din. Crabs skittering sideways on the sand, scorpions lurking in shadow, fish swimming quietly through the currents. In astrology, this silence was seen as symbolic. When Mercury, the planet of communication and thought, found itself in these signs, especially when “afflicted” by other tensions, the interpretation often pointed to a struggle with verbal expression. A tongue-tie. Words might form slower, less confidently, or remain unspoken altogether. But this interpretation, when handled without care, becomes a bit of a trap. Because the silence of the water signs is more of a fertile stillness. They listen to the undercurrent, the subtext, the heartbeat behind the words. They are fluent in pauses, in hesitations, in what is not said. To call them “mute” in a dismissive tone, then, is to miss the point entirely. The voice is vast, complex, and speaking in a dialect too deep for surface ears. Mercury in water signs is translating the inexpressible through art, through feelings, through conversations happening in through body language across a room, or in dreams that linger long after waking.

The water signs aren’t necessarily comfortable in a world obsessed with hot takes and constant broadcast. They are more concerned with the emotional resonance of a thing, with reality as vibration rather than proclamation. And this sensitivity can, of course, come at a cost. A person might hesitate, might retreat, might stammer or fall quiet when they have nothing to say, or because what they have to say is so drenched in feeling that the ordinary words can’t carry it. The old books might have called them mute. But perhaps, just perhaps, they were speaking a language the rest of us hadn’t yet learned to hear.

Mercury in the 12th house is also a placement hiding its thoughts in shadowy corners, in the folds of dreams, in the pages of diaries never shown. It’s the mind behind the veil, the intellect submerged beneath layers of feeling, fear, and often, an overwhelming sensitivity to the unseen. If the 3rd house is the busy marketplace of thought – noisy, bright, full of chatter – then the 12th is underwater. It is where thoughts don’t announce themselves.

People with Mercury here often carry the feeling of being unheard. In the literal sense through interruptions, misunderstandings, a sense of always being slightly off-frequency from everyone else, but in the soul-deep sense of being fundamentally unreadable to others. Thoughts are fogged glass, glimpsed but never grasped. The mind retreats inward, protecting itself from a world a world too insensitive for the perceptions it holds. And so it develops in secret, often growing profoundly imaginative, introspective, and intuitive. But also sometimes isolated, unsure, or even suspicious of language itself, its inadequacy, its betrayals.

The Silent Twins

The story of Jennifer and June Gibbons, the “Silent Twins,” is a harrowing, almost mythic illustration of Mercury in the 12th house. Natal Mercury is cloaked in the house of the unconscious and trining Pluto, the planet of the underworld, of compulsion, of transformation, suggesting deep and unconscious mind. Add a Moon-Neptune conjunction in Scorpio, the sign of emotional secrecy and intensity, and you have a cocktail of psychic sensitivity so potent it borders on overwhelming. It’s no surprise they turned inward, speaking only to each other, creating a private language, a shared universe no one else could penetrate. They were withdrawing from society, and they were building their own universe.

But of course, there’s danger here. The 12th house is also the house of confinement. It’s the house of institutions, prisons, hospitals, the places we are sent when we can no longer be contained by – or useful to – the visible world. Jennifer and June’s descent into crime and eventual institutionalization speaks to the shadow side of this placement: when the mind becomes too isolated, too cut off, it can twist in on itself.  Yet there’s still something deeply magnetic about them. They were writers, storytellers, creators of elaborate inner landscapes. Their silence was waiting to be understood.

When Mercury finds itself in a water realm, we’re already speaking of an inner dialogue steeped in feeling. These minds emote, they intuit, they absorb. And when Saturn enters the scene with its cold, corrective eye, things can get tense. It checks every sentence for weight and worth. It slows the words, tightens the throat, forces a kind of internal audit of thought before it can become speech. It is believed stammering is a feature of this aspect. Though my youngest son struggles a bit with stammering. Neptune is in his 3rd house. Often it is shy child who becomes the great orator because they know the value of words. This is what Lewis Carroll teaches us. In his chart, Mercury is in Capricorn, a sign ruled by Saturn, so immediately there’s a sobering influence on how he processed and communicated ideas. Add to it a square to Pluto, the planet of depth, compulsion, and psychological shadow, and you get a mind perhaps uncomfortable within itself, but undeniably powerful.

Carroll didn’t merely overcome communication difficulty, he transformed it. He turned language inside out. He gave us dream logic, nonsensical beauty, mirror-worlds and wordplay so profound it became its own genre. Mercury under pressure becomes a diamond. A square to Pluto may bring obsessive thought, or fear of being misunderstood – but it also gives relentless drive to be understood, no matter how strange the route may be. And Capricorn’s Mercury may speak more slowly, more deliberately, but it builds authority. Durable. Enduring. And in doing so, they often speak with a depth and honesty that the naturally fluent never touch.

King Charles I – monarch of divine right, doomed to lose both crown and head, and yet beneath the heavy robes of royalty, there lay a young boy with a stammer. A child struggling with the most basic act of being human: to speak and be heard. And how astrologically telling it is. Mercury is tangled in a square with Neptune, the great dissolver of words Here is ambiguity – words blurred at the edges, meaning elusive, the mind caught in the depths.

Mercury is also square Neptune in the 12th. Neptune spiritualizes language, diffuses it, sometimes drowns it. The mind becomes a hall of mirrors, where thoughts morph, evading capture. This can give a haunting beauty to speech, or a profound confusion. In a child, it might manifest as a struggle to be understood, words slipping away just as they form. And then we meet Saturn in the 3rd house – the house of communication, learning, siblings, the very domain Mercury rules. Here, Saturn sets up shop in Scorpio, the emotionally armored, hyper-perceptive sign. This is not a placement that takes communication lightly. It watches. It withholds. It mistrusts before it reveals. There’s fear of exposing too much, of being vulnerable. The mind becomes a defense. Speech becomes calculated, perhaps delayed, weighed down with the burden of consequence.

Charles, then, lived with a chart that set his mind swimming in deep, uncertain waters while burdening his expression with the weight of fear and criticism. A stammer makes sense here as the body’s desperate attempt to control what feels uncontrollable. Neptune floods. Saturn restricts. And poor Mercury, the quicksilver messenger, gets stuck between the tides. But Charles wasn’t remembered as a man who said nothing. He was a king. He issued decrees. He spoke of authority. He took a stand, however tragically misjudged it may have been. So again, we see this theme: the so-called affliction becoming an ability. The stammering child becomes the rhetorician. The internal hesitations harden into political convictions. Perhaps too hardened, in Charles’s case – but nonetheless, a transformation occurs. The fear of being misunderstood becomes the obsession with being right. The early silence births a voice that would echo through history, even as the man himself was silenced at the scaffold.

Einstein was the poster boy of genius, high priest of relativity, and yet, once upon a time, a little boy sitting quietly in the corner, saying nothing. Imagine it: the mind that would one day reconfigure time and space being dismissed by teachers as a lost cause. His very silence as a child became part of the mythology, the way people would later say, “Did you know he didn’t even talk until he was four?” As though he was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

Astrologically, we find Mercury conjunct Saturn, a pairing often misunderstood itself. Saturn is the great limiter, but also the great teacher. It doesn’t deny, it delays. Mercury, planet of the mind, of speech, of the little messenger gods zipping about in our heads, suddenly finds itself shackled to time, to fear, to the heavy expectations of the world. So speech might come late. Thoughts might form slower. But they come with depth, with weight, with form.

Mercury-Saturn individuals often feel scrutinized by authority figures. Saturn is authority embodied. And when it hooks into Mercury, it often plays out as the voice of criticism, sometimes external, often internal. The parent who corrects too sharply, the teacher who labels the child as slow, the inner voice saying, “You’re not smart enough,” even when you are. But once the individual learns to master their own internalized authority, once they stop seeking permission to speak and instead own their voice, the results can be staggering. Mercury-Saturn people often go on to be the most articulate, the most thoughtful, the most reliable thinkers and communicators. Like Einstein, who took his time forming thoughts because his mind wasn’t darting on the surface, it was plumbing the depths.

This brings us to the broader, more tantalizing question: can intelligence be seen in a natal chart? Well, here’s where we must tread carefully. Astrology doesn’t measure IQ. It doesn’t quantify brilliance with a number or an equation. What it does do – brilliantly – is show how a person thinks. The style of cognition. Whether someone is abstract or practical, emotionally attuned or mechanically accurate, verbally gifted or spatially inclined. Astrologers may argue over where intelligence resides in the chart, Mercury, of course, is central, but so is the 3rd house, the 9th, the sign placements, the aspects to Uranus or Jupiter, and more. But what matters most isn’t some singular “smart” placement. It’s what the person does with the chart they’ve been given. An afflicted Mercury doesn’t indicate a lack of intelligence, it often points to depth, to complexity, to a mind that must fight to be heard, and in doing so, becomes sharper and more focused over time.

Pluto in the 3rd house or darkly aspecting Mercury. This combination haunts. It’s the voice you feel more than hear. The one emerging after long silences, usually when the room has grown uncomfortably still. It isn’t always loud, but when it speaks, people listen. Because it knows something. It’s seen the bones beneath the words. The 3rd house, classically, is our early education, siblings, short communications, and the first fumbling attempts at language – our ABCs and “Mom, I’m scared of the dark.” But when Pluto, the god of the underworld, takes up residence there, things become far more intense. Childhood communication may be marked by secrets, by silences, by a sense that words aren’t safe. Perhaps there’s something hidden in the family. Perhaps the child senses unspoken rules, or grows up in an environment where saying the wrong thing can cause real damage. Speech becomes loaded, risky. Silence becomes armor.

Moreover, Pluto with Mercury – whether by conjunction, square, opposition or even trine – communication itself takes on a Plutonian flavor. It’s no longer simply transmitting information. It desires control, truth, power, revelation. These individuals might be quiet, but they aren’t passive. Their silence has a purpose. It’s the stillness of someone listening very closely. They’re parsing truth from subtext, always watching, always analyzing.

Of course, when either combination is rooted in trauma, the silence can be deeper, more defensive, even muted. Words may have once brought pain. Or perhaps they were used against them. The result can be a kind of muteness. A refusal or inability to share inner thoughts. Trust must be earned, and even then, cautiously. But when it is developed, when the fear is worked through, and the voice reclaimed, the result is powerful. These are the people who speak of realities others dare not touch. Therapists, investigators, writers who go to the dark places and return with gold. Their words can transform, cut through illusion, reveal what’s festering beneath polite conversation. They’re the people who drop one sentence in a room and suddenly everyone’s reassessing their lives.

Mercury-Uranus is the mind charging the speech circuits like a live wire, and it gives us an untamed communication style. In the case of something like Tourette’s, which straddles the complex realms of neurology, impulse, and societal taboo, it’s a fascinating astrological lens through which to observe the sudden and the suppressed. Mercury is our messenger – it governs language, the brain’s relay system, and how thoughts are formed. Uranus, on the other hand, is the lightning bolt. The maverick. It’s the nervous system in overdrive, the synapses sparking faster than polite society can manage. When these two planets meet, especially in hard aspect like the square or opposition, you often find rapid speech, impulsive, jagged,  and unexpected. Thoughts come too fast, too charged to be filtered.

In the context of Tourette’s, it fits eerily well. The neurological underpinnings of the condition, the misfired signals, the sudden tics, the uncontrollable eruptions of sound or word, mirror the unpredictable, compulsive energy of Uranus. The tendency for vocal outbursts, often inappropriate or taboo, aligns perfectly with Uranus’s disdain for societal norms, its love of the shocking, the transgressive. Uranus doesn’t want to behave. It wants to liberate. And in a system not quite wired to process this liberation, it can spill out as something misunderstood or pathologized.

This isn’t meant to reduce Tourette’s to astrology, of course. It’s a complex neurodevelopmental condition with many causes and expressions. But astrology gives us a symbolic reflection of the experience. Mercury-Uranus in a chart doesn’t mean someone will have Tourette’s, but it could suggest the mind and mouth don’t play by the usual rules. A person whose communication is charged, rebellious, electric. They might speak in sparks, interrupt themselves, struggle with filters. Or they might be brilliant improvisers, truth-tellers, social disruptors, the kind who say the thing everyone’s thinking but no one dares to voice.

Uranus is the planet of awakening. It reveals what Saturn tries to repress. It puts out there what society tries to tuck away. It’s why people with Mercury-Uranus aspects often feel alienated. Their way of speaking, thinking, even being might seem inappropriate to those invested in the Saturnian realm. But it’s also why they’re often the ones who catalyze change – by refusing to conform, by being unable to suppress what must be spoken. The wild truth breaks through the wall of decorum. A human embodiment of Mercury-Uranus: unfiltered, unpredictable, sometimes misunderstood, but undeniably real.

The winner of Big Brother 7, Pete Bennett, if memory serves, became such a poignant, public emblem of Tourette’s. The condition itself, and how it challenged public perceptions, and how he embodied it with humor, vulnerability, and authenticity. Mercury in Pisces square Uranus in his chart is almost archetypal in this regard. Pisces, with its fluid, boundary-blurring energy, lends a mystical, often non-linear quality to thought and expression. It can be highly imaginative but also prone to confusion, to slippage between the conscious and unconscious. And Uranus, sudden, electric, disruptive, throws in the unpredictable motor signals, the speech quirks, the mental lightning bolts refusing to be controlled. When these two clash, you get a mercurial system that simply doesn’t play by the usual rules.

What Pete brought into the public eye was awareness. A Uranian trait. He shocked, but in doing so, he helped awaken people to the idea of unedited expression. And this is where astrology, particularly through Mercury’s various guises, becomes such a rich field for understanding communication disorders as deeply encoded archetypal expressions. The Mercury-Uranus person might interrupt, digress, shout. Mercury-Saturn might stammer, delay, or fall mute. Mercury-Pluto might speak only when it’s safe, or hide meaning behind layered subtext. Mercury-Neptune might mumble, fantasize, or speak in riddles. Mercury-Mars might speak too fast, too loud, too aggressively. Each pairing is a kind of dialect, and within it are both the seeds of difficulty and the potential for mastery.

Now, this crosses into the charged debate about whether psychological and physical ailments are hardwired or imposed, nature or nurture, soul or soma. And while psychologists and doctors often cleave to the observable, measurable side of things, astrology reminds us that sometimes, the ailment is mythical. It isn’t to downplay the science, but to elevate the experience. To say, “Yes, this may be a neurological misfire. But it also tells a story.” A story about being different, about how we express ourselves, about what happens when speech becomes a battleground.

This is what makes astrology so deserving of deeper study. Because beyond the surface-level traits, we’re talking about the soul’s relationship to voice. To thought. To being heard. It matters. Communication difficulties are symbolic. They’re psychic.

Liz Greene, the psychologist-priestess of the astrological world, links Mercury-Neptune to a form of autism. The place where language dissolves, and where the boundary between inner and outer worlds blur. Mercury is our communicator, our linear thinker, our scribe of reality. It wants to label, describe, and explain. It brings the inside out and the outside in. But Neptune has no interest in such tidy translations. It speaks in dreams. It doesn’t communicate in the way Mercury does. It  feels. It dissolves. It seduces with vagueness. So when Mercury and Neptune come together, especially in tight, hard aspect, you often get a kind of psychic crossfade. Words become slippery. Thoughts drift. Communication may feel foggy.

In extreme forms, this might resemble what we call autism, particularly in cases where the child appears to live in a rich, sealed inner world, one where they can’t easily connect with external stimuli. The lines of communication might never have been built in the conventional sense. The child may talk in a language known only to them. Thoughts are so drenched in emotion, so saturated with inner symbolism, ordinary language cannot hold them. Greene’s deeper point is that we all have elements of this. Who among us hasn’t, at some point, failed to bridge the gap between self and other? Who hasn’t stared at a loved one, desperately wanting to explain a feeling and had no words? Or sat in a room full of people and felt utterly unreachable, even by those closest to us? This, too, is Mercury-Neptune. It’s human.

The difference, then, is degree. In the natal chart, Mercury-Neptune can suggest a person who struggles with direct communication, but also someone who expresses themselves best through music, poetry, art, or nonverbal forms. In the chart of a child, especially when paired with other sensitive placements (strong Pisces, 12th house activity, Moon-Neptune aspects), this could point to a need for non-traditional forms of connection. A child who feels deeply – perhaps even too deeply. A child who hears things others don’t, who’s overwhelmed by lights, sounds, emotions, energies. A child for whom the world is too loud and literal.

But again, this is language expanded. Reimagined. Rewritten. We might say Mercury-Neptune struggles with communication, but we might also say it transcends it. It doesn’t want to tell you something, it wants to dissolve the barrier between you. And when it works, it’s communion. Mercury in aspect to Neptune is a kind of archetypal autism: a longing for pure experience without interference, a mind so sensitive it recoils from intrusion. And perhaps, in our own moments of silence, confusion, or mystical yearning, we touch this same space within ourselves, the place where words fail, but something deeper stirs.