Through the Fire | New Moon in Aries | April 15, 2018

New Moon in Aries | April 15, 2017
6:57pm PST | 26 degrees 

Sunday’s New Moon in Aries ushers in the fires of vitality, producing the ash necessary for innovative fertility. This is the zodiacal New Year: the Sun and Moon will courageously renew one another, conjunct electrical Uranus, striking up a radiant fire of purification to push us into our upcoming journeys. Our work is to walk through this fire to find the alchemical formula for transmuting our personal shadows as we ascend into ever-greater awareness of the unified field of consciousness.

Uranus emphasizes the communal sweep of transformation that takes place on the atomized level. This is the synchronized transformation of individuals. While we are are collectively channeling a distinctly new energy, the way we will experience this transformation is more vertical than horizontal. The time now is to open upward and channel downward in a process of transformation that is experienced very personally.

Part of the opening-upward process will require education about the world around yourself. Growing awareness is critical, both internally and externally. Now is an important time to ask what actions open the heart and all vessels in the body for greater flow, and to what broader social context you can contribute this flow. If you don’t know the answers to those questions, try new things.

Mercury will station direct in the wee hours of the morning before the New Moon, which makes this lunation an incredibly potent time to seed alchemical transformation of the spirit. Magical operations are highly recommended.

Joannis Conradi Barchusen | Mercury and Sulphur | sourced via Pinterest

Ancient alchemists tell us that the Philosopher’s Stone, the spiritual Magnum Opus, is created through the purification of Mercury by fire. The Moon is, alchemically, associated with silvery Mercury. Manfred M. Junius wrote in Spagyrics, “Mercury is occasionally called the Moon, the Lunar, or Diana,” which is transformed by the active Solar principle of “invisible fire, and also of love.” Because the Mercury will station direct station just before this New Moon, we get precisely that: a purification of Mercury and mercurial energy (the spirit that can be willfully shaped) by fire.

While we’ve been heavily defined by the reality checks of Mercury Rx and the Mars-Saturn conjunction of early April, Mercury’s stationing direct in Aries will bring the warmth needed to revitalize spent muscles. It is without question the harbinger of this lunar rebirth. We will learn new ways of moving that had previously been unavailable. 

Remember that rebirth is a space of inexperience. While Aries is the sign of “I am,” don’t try to finish the sentence just yet. Allow yourself to remain porous and see how your new awareness can function more broadly in the world.

Change and surprises should be welcomed with open arms, through whatever doors they rush in. Discernment will follow shortly after, particularly when Saturn stations Retrograde on Tuesday, April 17, the same day that Saturn’s offspring, Chiron, ingresses into Aries after his 7-year transit through Pisces.

Monday and Tuesday morning will be particularly auspicious days for channeling celestial magic for manifestation. As the Moon moves into Taurus, the sky will be full of exalted planets, trines, textiles, and aspects among benefics. Opportunities for augmentation should abound, so select the seeds you wish to plant, call down these energies, and press your intentions into the warming earth, with all available optimism.

Chiron ingress into Aries | April 17 | 1:10am PST

Almost exactly fifty years ago, on April 1, 1968, Chiron left gentle Pisces for Aries, the sign that gives rise to the fiery warrior. 

Three days later on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN. This event triggered the violent riots of April 1968, which took place in 125 cities worldwide. 

Student Protesters | 1968 | Tufts Journal

The riots become a centerpiece in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign for presidency, who promised law and order as a reactionary measure in the face of the images of violence that conservative America now directly associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The legacy of these riots turned much of mainstream America vehemently against the inner city “urban crisis,” and this legacy remains alive in the taste of many Americans’ mouths today. 

Much of the narrative behind the continued inner city urban crisis and the general socioeconomic reality in America remains well beyond mainstream America’s scope of vision, thanks to politicking and pernicious stories told by people in positions of power.

Chiron, the Wounded Healer, is a fascinating character. As someone who suffers the wound he knows how to heal, one of his roles is expanding beyond stories he’s heard or told himself about his capability to heal himself. When Chiron entered Aries in 1968, many eyes opened to the reality of the tensions in America, but many eyes turned toward toxic stories about how that tension had arisen, and the mainstream cultural shift was toward shunning the tension entirely, assuming it could not be healed.

At this moment in time, the 1968 Riots are experiencing a Chiron Return, which at best will invite the opportunity to revisit this legacy and begin a deeper healing of its wounds, worldwide. It is the opportunity to individually open our eyes, interact with one another with humility, as human to human. While Chiron’s time in Pisces signaled the need to establish contact with the Soul underlying all things, Chiron’s impending 7 years in Aries will push us into relationship with learning from the Soul of individuals. It signals the importance of refining our capacity to listen to and respect one another’s personal experiences, responding to one another in with greater respect for autonomy in the midst of interdependence.

Saturn station Retrograde | April 17 | 6:47pm PST

Giuseppe Maria Crespi | The Seven Sacraments Confession | 1712 | sourced via WikiArt

As mentioned above, Saturn, head faculty of Reality School, has been bringing a bounty of hard lessons through his conjunction with Mars. As he stations Retrograde in the evening of Tuesday, April 17, we may expect his lessons to lighten up as he asks us to review the meaning of what has already come to pass.

Patience and self-forgiveness are the most important virtues under this motion. Saturn Retrograde can feel like visiting the Confessional, assessing the honor and decency of your responses to life’s hardship. We are not saints, and we will always come across our slip-ups in integrity. Be gentle with yourself, and use the lessons to ground more fully into shaping reality as you want to see it.

The bright side of this Retrogradation is that we have so many planets agreeably positioned as Saturn begins to retrace his steps. Our freedom of movement to discover meaning is greater than it might otherwise be. Seize the clarity for developing wisdom, and allow the seeds you planted at the New Moon to continue germinating quietly in the dark earth.

Eclipse Season Part 1: Jan. 31 Full Moon Eclipse in Leo | Feb. 1 Imbolc

Wednesday, Jan. 31 | As Old As Dragons
Full Supermoon Lunar Eclipse in Leo
5:27am PST| 11 degrees

Welcome Eclipse Season, a two-week stretch of sped-up evolution. We can always expect things to move a bit like someone has their finger on the time-lapse dial during eclipses. Time feels a little less linear. We get the chance to watch ourselves in amplified slow motion detail before we speed up and blow through our baggage at a breakneck pace. There’s a weird sci-fi feeling that permeates the air: the feeling that the past isn’t dead yet, that the future was born long ago, and that we are here to heal trajectories set in motion by processes beyond our comprehension. Karma with origins as old as dragons shows itself (think Reptile Brain), and our work is to assess and respond.

Eclipse Season begins on January 31 with a Full Supermoon Total Eclipse in Leo. This is the third of what astronomers are calling the Supermoon Trilogy (a Supermoon is when a Full Moon coincides closely when the Moon is the closest to Earth in its orbit, giving us an up to 30% brighter and much bigger Moon in the sky). 

So what is that about? A Big Moon means Big Emotions. Luna rules the personal emotional experience, so this is about your own emotions. With a Leo Eclipse, we are graced with an eye toward our more hyperbolic and attention-seeking inner dramas, so your personal shit is is extra visible at this time (to yourself and, it's safer to assume, to others as well). 

Your best option, of course, is the path of least resistance: cultivate a relationship with the personal experience whether you like what you find there or not. Word to the wise: cultivating a relationship with your inner experience is never indulgence, it’s mandatory for your sanity. So face what comes up around this time. If you absolutely have to, play it out to some degree, just keep consequences in mind.

Greetings from Krampus! | Greeting Card ca. 1900s | sourced via Wikimedia Commons

So as you work with these inner dramas, keep the ledger at hand and take notes for future navigation through your own waters. Ask the stories your emotions are trying to tell you and don’t skirt around what you hear. Play the neutral observer (Sun and South Node in Aquarius). Read and decode yourself, but remember that if your emotions don’t get heard and integrated, they will come back bigger and badder next time, Krampus style.

This Full Supermoon Eclipse in Leo also occurs the day before Imbolc, the cross quarter Pagan festival that since ancient times has been a day set aside to ritually purify the household, nurture the coming warmth, and light candles in honor of growing creative fires. So again, we get an amplification of Eclipse-style energy: purifying renewal, release, and propulsion forward.

Let’s keep in mind that the chart of this Full Moon has Venus conjunct the South Node in Aquarius, so if we’re going to get held up, it’s likely to be in vain attempts to remain aloof or to evade the grittier aspects of personal renewal and emotional integration. This is not easy work. The ego does not like to change shape. But the promise of this Leo Eclipse is that if we can humble ourselves and drop expectations about who we’re “supposed to be,” our souls will begin to shape our presence here with unprecedented levels of authenticity and truthfulness.

There is a Neptune quincunx to this Full Moon, which is again about emotional integration, but on a more colossal scale. This aspect can bring up pretty daunting psychological states like the existential loneliness that stretches all the way back to the pain of separation from our mothers at birth. Do your best not to numb yourself through hollow connections. Don’t feed things that don’t feed you. And remember that the kind of real connection that sincerely heals such existential Neptunian wounds requires the workout of going miles beyond the ego. Connection requires humility, so make sure you’re talking back to any dramatic Leonine thought patterns. Listen to the heart, not what the mind does to band-aid the heart.
 

Thursday, Feb. 1 | Imbolc

Image by author | 2017 | Avebury

This is the festival of the pan-Celtic Goddess Brigid, a solar deity who represents the transition of the Goddess from Crone to Maiden. Imbolc is therefore, traditionally, a celebration of the quickening of the earth after winter’s sleep. The festival takes place during early winter lambing, when ewes are birthing and milking their first young. It’s a potent time to look within and discover what young and vulnerable parts of yourself need tending.

Imbolc centers around rituals of purification and initiation. It is traditionally a time to begin planning and setting in motion new ventures creative, spiritual, and worldly. The energy we cultivate here is “out with the old, in with the new,” and a common ritual for Imbolc is cleaning the home and then hanging a broom, or besom, above the entrance to the home to protect its purified condition.

Brigid's Cross | sourced via Pinterest

Birch, which is associated with purification and protection, is often used to make the besoms, as well as the protective St. Brigid’s Cross traditionally made during Imbolc. As Maurice Bruce writes in “The Krampus from Styria,” The birch … may have a connection with the initiation rites of certain witch-covens; rites which entailed binding and scourging as a form of mock-death.” And indeed, Birch forests have since ancient times been associated with spirits of the dead and with the process of mourning.

Initiation is a tender process that requires awareness of what we have released, or are in the process of releasing. The bond between death and birth is unequivocal. So while we want to treat Imbolc as an occasion to open up to the warmth of new trajectories, we must develop an astute relationship with what is passing, and of the cold that remains around what is no longer living.

In keeping with the nuanced duality of this festival of purification and initiation, Brigid rules both fire and water. She rules Poetry and Bardic Lore, for she offers the gift of the creative “fire in the mind” to the poets. Yet she also rules water, Sacred Wells, and therefore the art of Augury as well. For this question of the watery source from the “Otherworld” is deeply linked with creativity. We must look beyond the immediately accessible dimensions of our existence in order to feed the creative fires that propel us forward.

So Brigid, also Goddess of Milk, reminds us that with all of the poise required to navigate the balanced tapestry of life and death, the key is the simple stuff of nurturance. This is a time to care for yourself, as both mother and father. Cultivate composure and purified structures for yourself while simultaneously tending the hearth fire for the vulnerable sides of yourself just beginning to emerge. As winter’s freeze melts away and the earth begins to warm enough for the first shoots of spring to appear, reflect on how your internal world mirrors this process, and remember that summer’s ease is some months out. Circumspect care is required here. Go attentively!

Suggested Ritual:

Clear a surface in your house for an altar (if you already have an altar, clear that space). Place a bowl on the altar and fill it with purified water to represent Brigid’s Sacred Wells. Secure a red or white candle, and place this on the altar as well to represent the Creative Fire that will help you to envision and propel yourself into the future. Take some time to write down what the Creative Fire feels like in your personal world, and how you would like to draw from the Sacred Well to purify yourself and deepen your creative process. 

As mentioned above, it is also an ideal time to clean the home and hang a broom above the entrance for protection. If you don’t have a broom that feels suitable to hang above the door, then go outside and collect some twigs. Wrap some twine around the twigs so you have a small bundle that acts as your symbolic broom, and hang that above the door.

Most importantly, reflect on the intentions you have already set for this calendar year, and check in to see what kind of progress you have made with them. Do you need to revise your intentions? If so, this is the time. Rewrite your plans. Really strategize on how you can bring things into fruition. Because Imbolc syncs up with this Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Leo, listen to the actual state of your emotions as they are, and integrate that as you revise your intentions and your plans to manifest them. Don’t sell yourself short, but keep it real, pups.

Imbolc blessings.

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