Death and the Maiden | New Moon Solar Eclipse in Capricorn 2019
New Moon Solar Eclipse in Capricorn | January 5, 2018
15 degrees | 7:28pm CST
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
There is a classical motif in which a maiden explores a territory, usually a carefree landscape, a place where she can gather flowers and reflect on her own internal wealth, externalized by a springtime scene. In this image suddenly, beneath her very feet, the ground maws open. Death shows his face, and beckons or abducts the girl into his somber world.
The fascinating thing about the Death and the Maiden motif is that it matures through its recurrence. While the girl is beckoned into the underworld, she always returns to her springtime landscape, only to cycle back toward her journeys through the underworld, accompanied alone by her added layers of perspective.
We can apply this vision to the return of Eclipse Season. Our last sequence of Eclipses in July and August gave us enormous trials and breakthroughs in staying centered amongst inflammatory environments. The many months of retrograde-filled skies that followed escorted us through the polarized abysses of our personal underworlds, and we’ve seen ourselves adapt to these environments. While rest and rehabilitation are in order, our tests of endurance are not over. We’ve come to a place of perspective, but the shifts we’ve undergone in the past months through our journeys have primarily shown us just how much we can actually do, and therefore how much we have left to do. We’re just getting started with our world-building. As Capricorn likes to remind us, we’ve built these muscles to use them.
Intensely Capricornian, today’s New Moon partial Solar Eclipse focuses the lens in on several long-term cycles that will come to a close in 2020. From now until the end of that year, we will be resolutely refining our capacities to bend the structures of our world to our spiritual advantage, building the new realities we most need to see in the world around us. Every step along the way, Capricorn will be offering its gifts, teaching us how to become increasingly grounded, disciplined, and focused without disservicing the soul’s presence in the body.
Capricorn Constellation | sourced via Pinterest
Capricorn is the sea-goat, the ultimate earth-extremophile, fearlessly navigating the deepest currents of the sea and scaling the highest mountains in one fell swoop. Capricorn constantly cycles between the delicate beauty of the foothill’s wildflowers and the shallow sea’s reefs, and the cold hells the mountaintop’s thin air and the ocean floor’s darkness. In short, the language of Capricorn’s gifts is both exhilarating and terrifying, affirming us in the wildest moments of accomplishment, and rigidly barring the way where survival is unworkable. Capricorn’s are heavy gifts, ones that ask us to walk the line between the ascendancy of what we care for, and its death.
We must be very careful now to focus attention on our real values because Saturn, the Master of this Capricorn Eclipse, sits very close to the Moon and Sun during the event, and Saturn binds us to whatever it is that we truly value. So get clear on what it is that you value, and what internal structures connect you to these values. Which structures have trapped you in the past, and which contribute to the liberation of your creative energy? Organize yourself by getting an understanding of your ambitions and which bonds actually help you work toward them.
Following value systems, Saturn brings our attention to hierarchies, a frequently abused subject. Hierarchy is easy to get wrong because many of us mistakenly perceive personal power as something sourced from outside ourselves, when in fact the power that permeates all of Being is sourced from within. Knowing that the path of your own instinctive, creative energy is the most loving gift you can offer the world, think about what the fire in your heart propels you toward. If you make those things your first commitments, what are you willing to sacrifice to get there? Now is a time to allow for a radical restructuring of your personal hierarchy of ambitions and bonds.
Whether or not you have to reorganize, don’t forego the hierarchy. Having a structured understanding of your priorities will prove hugely useful as you move forward from this point in time.
With the Sun eclipsing in Capricorn, there’s a spotlight shining brightly on what works and what doesn’t. Inefficiency and ineffectiveness are under scrutiny now. The project of releasing ineffective methods previously employed by your ego is most important. So get with it: decompose the ego structures that just haven’t worked for you. With Eclipses, if we can let go of what doesn’t serve while nurturing the highest intention of welcoming in what does, then the work is 95% done. If you don’t know yet what structures will serve you in the future, keep your eyes open, and before you know it you’ll encounter the strategies that will pave the road you’ll soon be walking. Where we find ourselves then will be infinitely more supple than where we were.
With all of this in mind, remember to stay restful and low-key in the days surrounding this Eclipse. Eclipse energies are exhaustingly potent. With a supportive sextile to this Eclipse from Neptune in Pisces, you’ll want to respect whatever boundaries are necessary to help you hone in on metaphysical reflection. Buoyant Jupiter squares Neptune, and Mars in Aries squares Mercury who is newly ingressed into Capricorn, so the unhealthy impulse may be to overextend and spiral outward chaotically into assumed “responsibilities” to avoid the intensity of the soul’s efforts to reorganize and clear out the internal landscape to make space for something more joyful.
The reality of this Eclipse is that on a very personal level we’re processing the dissonance of global end times. The architecture of value, the methods of securing resources, and the structures our societies are built upon are in the midst of massive historical decay and shift. If we don’t take the time to turn attention inward and build an order of loving-kindness amongst ourselves, our environments, and those closest to us, we continue sowing seeds of chaos. So stay present with yourself and the world you create every day from your own resources. These are the perspectives you need to carry with you into the underworlds.
Sandro Botticelli | Pallas and the Centaur | 1418 | sourced via Wikimedia.com
While hard work continues to permeate the air, we have a very positive ingress to look forward to in two days’ time. Venus will enter Sagittarius, where she brings a kaleidoscopic array of color and momentum into the realm of intimate and creative energies. While today is a time for deep-sea diving and building new internal orders, by and by we’ll be revealing the new colors that we’ve found therein, organically establishing new social orders, borne from the most authentic body politic that can exist: a community of self-creating individuals.
Ultimately the strange beauty of the Death and the Maiden motif is that the maiden comes to embrace Death when he arrives. She welcomes her time in the underworld, knowing her power there. With no dread or resistance, she fluidly navigates the multifaceted layers of her existence, harnessing her agency to build a new world from wherever she goes.
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