Truth or Dare?
Where to start? This will be an 'end of the year' astrological look at the energies at play in the cosmos during this most intense, chaotic, antagonistic year. Let's look at these big aspects that set the stage for this Full Moon and the New Year.
Evolution & Revolution
That old Pluto/Uranus square that rocked our world from 2012-2015 is again being resonated now and next year by Jupiter's journey through Libra, mirroring the effects of its transit through Cancer in 2013-14. (These energies are especially affecting the United States because of our 4th of July Cancer birthchart, with Jupiter as our ruling planet.) Originating in the 60s, this Pluto/Uranus first quarter square brought together a clash of the titans.
Look at the economic chaos that's taken place here in America and around the world since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008. Pluto rules all those things that need to accept death. (Accept is the right word – patriarchy refuses to accept its death and instead creates death all over the world.) Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, that part of human experience which we tend to ignore, repress and fear. Since patriarchy hasn't accepted its death yet—in fact, it came back stronger than ever during the US elections—it gets to exhibit, in front of the whole world, those shadow values and qualities that have taken root in this social paradigm: domination, greed, competition, misogyny, cruelty, death, hypocrisy and terror. Patriarchy's shadow thrives on terror. It appears we've voted for a close encounter with the zombie apocalypse 'coming soon to a neighborhood near you.'
Now look at all the social upheaval that's occurred since 2012, when Uranus entered Aries to awaken us to our archetypal identities and a new sense of ourselves as having an impact on the world. Uranus rules the upper world of the heavens, the immense possibilities of life, which naturally want to break free of old, constricting attitudes and stereotypes that no longer express their true archetypal meanings. Uranus in Aries gives us a sense of future possibilities of who we can be. We all get a chance to see ourselves in a new light as we realize how far we've come from the myth of America as 'the land of the free and the home of the brave.' Now we get to see out in the open how the top 1% controls all aspects of our collective life—especially under a Trump presidency. We get to see the prevalent misogyny of American culture, with Christianity offering the excuse, just as Islam does, for its need to control women's bodies. We get to see a complete disregard for the Earth as our only home, which is being polluted for profit.
And the cosmos asks each one of us, 'what are you going to do about it?'
Pluto killed us as consumers and Uranus awakened us as citizens.
Our cosmic instructions concern how we are relating to our collective culture (Pluto in Capricorn)—our economics, our social structures, the 'rules of engagement' that have shaped our collective purpose for quite some time now. What parts of this collective mindset no longer serve the goals of humanity and freedom? What parts do we need to preserve and expand on? Let your part of this old story go! The fabric is rotten and the weave unravels.
What does the future demand of us? How can we keep harvesting the gifts and treasures of Mother Earth without a thought of what future generations might need? How can we stop the train wreck of continual progress and find new ways to create a better life? To do this, the patriarchal mindset has to crumble. Once it does, it can be replaced by a partnership model of culture that values feelings as well as thinking, intuition as well as sensation, women as well as men, the Earth and all of nature as well as humans. It's up to each of us to go out and make the new story happen.
This is the energy Jupiter in Libra is bringing into this powerful engine of change. A sense of balance, of fairness and justice, of courtesy and honor, beauty and art. It's offering each of us (Uranus) a way to engage in the transformation of the culture (Pluto). We can begin to create this possible future with our art and our actions. Our actions, like what happened at Standing Rock with the Water Protectors, now will have more effect since we'll do it as a group (very Aquarian of us). We show our Aries courage in standing up to the wrong use of power, to the stupidity of self-destruction. Life is what matters. Uranus is energizing our pioneering spirit again, though this time let's seek the unknown for the good of all, rather than personal aggrandizement.
Artists have a big part to play now, too. The Arts used to be healing tools for the collective psyche, unlike how they are seen today as a commodity. When we return the Arts to their archetypal purpose—to teach, to heal, to create, to enliven, to imagine, to share, to learn—they will lead the revolution just as John Lennon and the Beatles opened up the world to a new paradigm. Artists can bring the message home to the heart.
When the North Node leaves Virgo and goes into Leo next year at Beltane, our cosmic destiny is to express ourselves, especially through the arts. The Broadway show Hamilton is doing it—bringing history alive again so we understand what moment in history we're at and how we've changed but stayed the same. When America has its first Pluto return in 2023 (yes, we still have a few years to go of this rot) the revolution will happen. If we play our parts in truth, it will be a peaceful revolution, because it will be the right thing to do.
And now we turn to the whole issue of truth vs. illusion, fake news, strong beliefs and the end of the world.
Truth or Delusion
Wow! What a year! It's been all about our beliefs, whether they reflect the Truth or not. With Saturn journeying through Sagittarius, all of our beliefs, our tenuous connection to the cosmic laws of life, are being scrutinized. We like to think that our scrutiny revealed deep-seated beliefs that reflect our overt religious beliefs and spiritual aspirations. And yet, with Neptune in Pisces throwing his glamour over everything, we had to work hard (Saturn) to discern what was true from what was illusion. Instead of revealing our integrity, our honor, our sense of unity, the US presidential race revealed something else about our country. It revealed America's shadow: our misogyny, lies, tax evasions, racism, competition, bullying and hypocrisy. Instead of truth and imagination (which is a very conscious option of these energies) we got sex, lies, and videotapes (the dumbed down version).
What can we believe? Saturn is a taskmaster but he only sets us tasks that our soul requires us to learn. Instead of being afraid, feeling limited and wanting to hide under the covers, Saturn can help us focus on finding our cosmic rhythm – he does rule Time and Space, our 3-D reality. He's the Reality Check who grounds us in who we really are or trips us up when we pretend we're someone we're not. Truth or Dare? What will it be?
Saturn is connected to the archetypal Father, the energy that guides us into the world, the bridge between self and other. When we have a hard time creating our lives, perhaps we have a poor relationship with the Father/Saturn. Or maybe, we just never fit into the Father's agenda and so stayed limited on the edge of things. Either way, Saturn trained us. We probably are more disciplined, more organized, more grounded knowing our limits and filling them out. Now if we've embodied our Saturn, what happens next? With Saturn in Sagittarius, we stand up for our beliefs—whether they're bullying, racist, dominator beliefs; morally, enlightened religious beliefs; or compassionate, fierce protective beliefs.
Enter Neptune, swimming with both dolphins (to lead us on) and sharks (to devour the dead). Neptune entered his own sign of Pisces in February 2012, just after Uranus entered Aries. Neptune in Pisces awakens our longing for spirit and for a better world, a unified world, a healthy world. And it rules mob psychology and delusion—we saw a lot of that during the campaigns. Neptune deludes us with the illusions that feed our ego needs (delusion is a belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth) rather than our soul's needs. Conscious Neptune enchants us with the magic of the imagination. Neptune sends us dreams from the collective unconscious, where the hopes and fears of humanity lie. Neptune only deludes us if we are can't find our center. That's Saturn. If our Saturn is too rigid and fearful, we can't stay centered in ourselves, so we are easy victims of delusions. The need for control arises from our fears. Let them go.
Pisces is also our collective heart and Neptune has us listening to different dreams, dreams not controlled by collective consciousness but by our heart's desire. Patriarchy fears that most of all, so it seeks to control our imaginations through its use of the media, overwhelming our collective psyche with images of their choosing, not ours or the Earth's. But if we pull back and listen in the silence, Neptune's mystical voice tells us that it is our heart that knows our true desire and it is our imaginations which will show us new possibilities for life. Not the corporate media.
All year long, these archetypal opposites challenged each other. Neptune's energy enhances our receptivity, our feelings, our imaginative visions and probably multi-dimensional wormholes. Saturn is form and structure, time and space, limits and responsibility. Very opposite energies. The argument about Fake News is an aspect of these conflicting energies. What's real or just illusion? With a president-elect who can't seem to tell the difference, we'll have to find out for ourselves. The challenge of a square is that we have to see which energy has to give and where and see what we come up with.
If we let Neptune dissolve some of Saturn's formative beliefs, we can realize that some of our beliefs are childish, outworn or just not true. These are the beliefs that don't hold true for our grown-up experience of cosmic laws. They need to be taken back into the collective unconscious and dissolved back into their essence. If we let Saturn give some form and structure to our visions and feelings, we can build our new life story. So the gift of this square is to see through our limiting beliefs and choose to create a new ground of being for ourselves based on our soul's purpose. What would our life look like if we lived with empowering beliefs rather than limiting ones? We create a whole different story, don't we? It does involve standing up for our beliefs, but without the rigidity of needing to be self-righteous. Instead, we can let our imagination enchant someone awake instead of insisting that they wake up.
Now that Saturn is moving a bit beyond its square to Neptune, the asteroid Chiron becomes Saturn's Neptunian partner in this portion of the Cosmic Dance. What can Chiron teach us about the needs of humanity at this evolutionary moment? Chiron in Pisces teaches us we are here for everyone else and that we need to know who we are and what we value to succeed in our individual quest. Perhaps next year we'll get a chance to heal the divisions within ourselves and within society. Wouldn't that be the best outcome for our current situation? I think once we see what kind of government our corporate leaders give us, the middle will become more radicalized and we will unite and find our common interests aren't so different. In part, we will recognize that our religious beliefs no longer suit the multi-dimensional world we live in. The hope of the Aquarian Age is that each of us gets to live out our soul's purpose with creativity, respect and integrity, and that our lives will benefit the whole without taking away our uniqueness and freedom.
The Moon in Gemini becomes part of this truth-seeking mix now, so let's turn to the Gemini-Sagittarius Full Moon.
Gemini-Sagittarius Full Moon 2016
The Gemini-Sagittarius Full Moon occurs on Tuesday, December 13, 2016 at 4:05pm PST/ 7:05pm EST and on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 12:05am GMT.
The Sabian symbol for the Sun at 23* Sagittarius is: The torch and spiked crown of the Statue of Liberty. (This image comes from Steve Eardley's Revised Sabian Symbols.) This symbol speaks to “promethean man—urging humankind to attain their full statue.” It speaks to a freedom of spirit, which encourages us to fight for political, social and religious freedom and makes us vigilant in protecting democracy from dictators and the rule of force. We are being called to stand up for our freedoms in this image. I love synchronicity! While Dane Rudhyar's An Astrological Mandala gives this image: A group of immigrants as they fulfill the requirements of entrance into the new country. This image speaks not only to our current immigration issues but also on an inner level to the need to consciously accept the new ways of being that a new life demands.
The Sabian symbol for the Moon at 23* Gemini is: Three fledglings look out from their high nest. (This is the same image in both systems.) This symbol speaks to the process (3 is the number of process) of creatively integrating this new reality into our personality. It calls us to step back and look at things from a spiritual perspective, rather than from our fears and anxiety. This attitude can help us share our point of view in a calm and considerate manner instead of needing to 'fight' those we oppose.
A Full Moon asks us to bring together complementary ideas: Sagittarius wants us to see the Truth of the matter while Gemini wants to communicate the information that can help us see more clearly what our truth is. A Full Moon makes us aware of what we've been unconscious of. So step back and take a look at your core beliefs then look at what you're thinking. What ideas and information and knowledge no longer fit the truth? Are these beliefs the result of old psychological wounds (Chiron in Pisces challenging this Full Moon)? How have we been distracting ourselves with information overload when the truth can be found in our hearts? What thoughts, words and information need to be refined and which need to be let go of?
Saturn joins the Sun during this Full Moon, helping us set up filters for discerning what information is true and what is false. Saturn wants us to take responsibility for our beliefs, and because Saturn symbolizes authority, we need to understand that the word authority confronts us with the question, 'who is the author of my story.' The word author means 'one who makes or creates.' We can give away our authority and let someone else write our story or we can take back control and become the authors of our own lives.
The Sabian symbol (Rudhyar) for Saturn at 19* Sagittarius is: Pelicans menaced by the behavior and refuse of men seek safer areas for bringing up their young. If we are concerned for the future, of our planet and of humanity, we have to find new ways of living that protect the environment and connect us with Nature. Ancient traditions about the pelican imply that they are so protective of their young that they will pierce their own hearts to feed and protect them. Are we willing to sacrifice our entitled way of life to stand up for the future?
The ruler of the Gemini Moon is Mercury, which is connecting with Pluto in Capricorn just as it's slowing down to turn retrograde on Monday, December 19, 2016—the day of the Electoral College vote. Pluto deepens the Mind (Mercury) and strips it of everything that is non-essential. This should be interesting. Will enough electors desert Trump to make the election invalid? Will the vote be challenged and changed? We have all experienced how Mercury retrograde can put a stop to our plans. Mercury is also square Jupiter in Libra and Uranus in Aries. Curiouser and curiouser.
The Sabian symbol (Eardley) for Mercury retrograde at 16* Capricorn is: An earthen cave crowded with uniformed men. This image implies that when we're grounded by Mother Earth, within our own psyches, we can find the discipline and focus we need to affect social change. This small group represents the critical mass needed to change things, if we volunteer to take action. Will the electors see what is needed and change the script? The ruler of the Sagittarius Sun is Jupiter in Libra, expanding our vision of fairness and justice. The Sabian symbol (Eardley) for Jupiter at 19* Libra speaks to group protests against unbalanced social injustice. Robbers hiding in a starlit forest, ready to attack a caravan laden with precious cargo. How do the dispossessed find justice?
Upcoming Astrological Events
December 19, 2016: Mercury goes retrograde at 16* Capricorn conjunct Pluto, square both Jupiter in Libra and Uranus in Aries. We have to take ourselves and our world seriously. Mercury is retrograde until January 8, 2017.
December 21, 2016: WINTER SOLSTICE—the rebirth of the Sun in the northern hemisphere.
December 24, 2016: Saturn trines Uranus. There's more flow now and new forms can be created. Responsible changes might be on their way.
December 26, 2016: Jupiter opposes Uranus. It's time to do things differently.
December 28, 2016: Capricorn New Moon.
December 29, 2016: Uranus goes direct. Watch out for wild energies and abrupt changes.
