Welcome my friends, 

The Sun, Venus, Mercury all start the month in Libra, with Mars joining them in the sign on the fifth, while the Moon starts the month in Scorpio. However, Mercury jumps into Scorpio on the fourth followed quickly by Venus on the ninth, so as far as the personal planets go the feeling of the month will be both Libran and Scorpionic.

As we will see below, there are other rather contradictory energetics throughout the month as we meet major structural obstacles and, significant emotional and psychic flux, which will challenge our ability to stay focused on business, while being drawn into waves of internal fluidity.

Healing is highlighted!

The Libran Sun starts the month directly opposite Chiron the wounded healer in Aries, while trining Hygeia, the kundalini goddess of healing in Gemini. Chiron and Hygeia can be seen as a healing sacred marriage between teacher and perhaps his greatest student. Having the two engaging the Sun is particularly auspicious as both are not only great healers but are holders of lifetimes of gathered sacred and healing knowledge that becomes more and more available the deeper we go in our healing processes.

Their modes of healing is a quite different though, as Chiron is about the hero’s journey who dives into one’s pain and woundedness in order to pierce through our defences and anaesthetisations into deeper layers of the latent healing power within each of us; while Hygeia represents the organic healing intelligence in your body that get activated whenever we can drop out of our heads and can surrender into our body energies and emotions.

Chiron in Aries represents those places where our inherent fire, passion, courage and independence has been wounded or overlaid by wounded energy. Having an opposition to a Libran Sun is a significant challenge to the urbane, peace loving and cerebral Libran, as Chiron will simultaneously ignite old fiery wounds while piercing into layers of our deeper emotional selves. So, we can expect to revisit some painful experiences or have some old wound re-opened in order to get us to heal more deeply than in previous healing cycles.

While the above can be very unpleasant or downright painful, the trine from the Sun to Hygeia offers a less strident and more gracious form of healing from the deep feminine, which nevertheless has the capacity to purify ancient forms of toxins while clearing the way for more rapturous expressions of the sacred feminine power within us.

(This sounds like a significant rock ‘n’ roll between pleasure and pain; apologies to the late, great Chrissy Amphlett!)
Those of you in your late 40s and having your Chiron return will be particularly sensitised to this transit.

Libran Sun Square Saturn, South Node and Persephone in Capricorn

The Sun Square Saturn often coincides with meeting significant resistances, delays and obstacles from the outer world, all of which are a mirror of internal psychic scaffolding based on early conditioning influences, including negative patriarchal ones. On a deeper level Saturn is a firm and wise teacher who throws up such challenges to test you out in terms of clarity, discipline and self-responsibility.

However, in hanging out with an ancient goddess of the underworld and the major symbol of past life influences, positive and negative, there is so much more to the challenges inherent here. And as many of you know, these are not new challenges to us this year, as these three plus Pluto have been working on us, or working us over, for most of the year.

So, some of the obstacles to be confronted can have much more ancient karmic origins, often including some pretty horrible past life experiences bought close to the surface and infusing the present. Within this though are profound opportunities to release blockages around owning one’s power and authority and, for releasing ancient and multilayered forms of grief.  

Don’t be fooled by surface appearances or by people who may act as triggers (which both Chiron and Saturn are happy to provide!) because there is nothing insignificant behind the feelings aroused, as South Node territory always offers releases that liberate us to get more fully aligned with our authentic life purposes.

If you get really stuck, do some emotional release work like breathwork, primal or experiential astrology, or work with someone who uses regression work and can hold the same kind of spaces for releasing psychic emotional material.

Venus conjunct Mercury and Hecate in Libra

Here we have the Goddess of Love joining the Queen of the Witches will also happens to be the ultimate medicine woman, with Mercury the planet of the mind watching the great interest.

What happens here is very much dependent on the current status of Hecate within each of us. Like her fellow sorceress Medusa, she can be the carrier of great trauma and great psychospiritual power mixed with toxic rage resulting from ancient atrocities. She is also the magical, benevolent patron of earth based traditions, secret women’s business, of shamans and priestesses, and midwives in all their forms.

Venus here is invited into this territory in ways that will play out in our relationships this month, where Hecate can initiate her into that deeper mysteries of the sacred feminine. Such initiations can initiate the releasing of such ancient pain and rage which in turn can clear major obstacles from our hearts and the sacredness of our sexuality. There is tremendous Shakti here, making an ideal time for tantric practices, yoni and womb work, sex magic and healing, for initiating women and in the right circumstances, for initiating men.

The very same symbolism encourages us to love more fully those parts of ourselves that have been rejected and banished from our conscious selves. This can be a time of long-awaited reclamation.

These potentials are supported by sextiles to Jupiter in Sagittarius who is also conjunct the great earth mother Ceres or Demeter, both of whom can hold large and safe spaces for such a deep and intimate processes, from both masculine and feminine origins. And this support is greatly needed at this time, considering the next paragraphs.

Venus/Hecate/Mercury Square Pluto conjunct Medusa in Capricorn

This is an incredibly tough line-up, a logjam in our collective psyches reaching critical mass, putting everyone and our relationships under enormous pressure. The awesome potential of the above collides with deep and necessary transformations, ones that bring much ancient material to the surface for purification, especially around the legacies of Hecate and Medusa.

With this kind of pressure cooker, it’s imperative that we find ways of releasing the pressure valves in ourselves, while we bring focused attention to the needs of this kind of purification. This is not a time to sit on our hands or to choose anaesthetisation.  

Dance, scream, rage, howl, allow for physical and emotional release of pressure whenever and wherever possible. Be aware that your projections may get more rabid and therefore more destructive if you act on them. Watch out for exploding or imploding in your relationship, even if you’re significant other appears to deserve it. Take responsibility for the toxic enraged and rejected goddesses within you, by loving her while giving her outlets for her pain. Give yourself permission to have whatever rage, and grief, you carry towards the opposite sex and take that into therapeutically safe and permissive places.

Invite the deeper grace and transformative power of the sacred feminine, of the very same goddesses, underneath whatever distortions we carry.

On a gentler and subtler level, use whatever meditations and spiritual practices that work with mobilising psychic emotional toxins out of your system, as it’s all about keeping energy moving. (An adapted version of the Golden Kali meditation revealed by Andrew Harvey in his book “Hope” is available on the website here.

Black Moon Conjunct Neptune in Pisces

The Black Moon is now exactly, to the minutes of a degree, with Neptune, a conjunction that can be like driving into swampy water flooding the road ahead, where your steering gets loose and you don’t know what you are driving into.
The swampy water represents deep unconscious forces flushing up unresolved emotional and psychic energies from past, that set up various traps for the excesses of our egos and, seek to purify distortions around our sexuality and capacity for love (especially with the two being opposite to Juno, the goddess of marriage in Virgo)

Psychologically this can be a difficult time for some of us, and we can expect some very toxic material to arise, that can temporarily knock us off course. At times like this it’s important to remember a number of things;

• don’t attempt to plough your way through it, slow up, stop even and listen within.
• that this transit affects everybody and so you are not alone in feeling what you are feeling.
• it is an opportunity to get in touch with, and release, accumulated and unexpressed emotional energy.
• It supports the digging out of absorbed ancestral trauma, grief and rage, so use whatever practices work for you spiritually and therapeutically.
• be kind to yourself and look after your psychic boundaries, some of what you will be feeling doesn’t necessarily belong to you.
• you can have life changing breakthroughs in your spiritual and healing journeys at such time.

Often at these times we can feel incredibly disheartened, alone and at the mercy of things beyond our control. But like many “dark” transits there are great spiritual mysteries behind the initial manifestations. The Black Moon is associated with different versions of the Great Mother, which includes the Black Madonna and the great protective mother Durga.

Neptune conjunct the Black Moon gives us access to these expressions of the goddess who support us in often hidden ways as we go through times of great transition. There are powerful meditations for connecting us with these expressions of the sacred feminine, from the work of Andrew Harvey, Matthew Fox and with Durga, from the brilliant Sally Kempton.
One gift of the Black Moon is true fearlessness!

Jupiter Square Black Moon and Neptune

As I’ve said above, having Jupiter involved with the Black Moon/Neptune conjunction can modify the purificatory extremes of the Black Moon by adding grace and fluidity to whatever processes are going on there. Basically, he can help us get more confluent with the demands of these unconscious forces, to be able to move through even the darkest challenges, to be able to surrender more easily and to trust the hidden intelligence behind the actions of this form of the Great Mother.

However, we should not fall into the trap of thinking that Jupiter is simply all good. On one level, Jupiter energy will expand whatever it touches, whether positive or negative. For instance, all the leading Nazis had fabulous Jupiters, which contributed to the megalomania and the sheer scope of their destructiveness.

Less dramatically, one thing we need to watch out for with a Neptune Black Moon conjunction (which will be operating for the next months) is that instead of feeling the feelings, facing the shadows and consciously working with the purification processes, it can be a little bit too easy to take the path of anaesthetisation, to avoid such a necessary confrontation. Unfortunately, our culture encourages this shadow expression of Neptune, through the more obvious escape mechanisms of using drugs, alcohol, screen addictions et cetera.

And we must watch out for upper chakra forms of meditation as well that, can allow an individual to avoid where the real work is, around our lower chakras. However, any meditation that engages the latter can bear enormous fruit at times like this, as it engages the purificatory and transformative power inherent in each of us. By consciously drawing from the protectiveness of the Great Mother, we can feel progressively safer to go into this dark and mysterious territory. And Jupiter will add his gracious largesse to proceedings.

Spiritually this is such a potent alignment and can set the stage for some profound and spectacular spiritual awakenings. Just watch out for any slipperiness within us on the journey towards this potential.

Black Moon/Neptune Conjunction in Pisces Sextile the Saturn/Pluto/Medusa/Persephone/South Node conjunction in Capricorn!

As Neptune opens us to the enormous power potential of the Great Mother inside us, the two streams that supportive potency into this Capricorn convergence demanding transformation from all of us. As a feminine equivalent of Pluto, the Black Moon intensifies the deconstruction of old Saturnian patterning, the necessary purifications and psychic deaths that proceeds rebirth, the lancing of old wounds around grief and rage.

They also while add tremendous Shakti to our efforts to create structures reflecting our authentic selves and that allow us to make major contributions to the collective good and to the necessary cultural transformations so clearly needed at this time.

And yes, it does get very frightening when old previously solid structures beneath us, and inside us, start to wobble and shudder. However, in conferring greater courage and greater psychic fluidity through the sextiles, the necessary inner work can flow more easily, we find deeper holding places from within ourselves that allow us to trust and to surrender more easily.

While the more vomitus purification processes are equally scary and painful, it’s psychic emotional releasing creates greater space inside us for the Shakti of the Divine Mother to fuel and fire up all our chakras internally, while empowering our creative potency in the outer world. The Black Moon pours the Shakti into Neptune, describing a deeper radical empowering of our spiritual and psychic gifts that can then be translated into physical manifestation.

This is one of the ultimate goals of the ongoing convergence in Capricorn, the owning of our authentic self in sync with our core collective and individual soul purposes or life missions.

Shiva conjunct North Node in Cancer

Since the start of the Capricorn convergence in February, all wrapped around the South Node, with all its mysterious karmic and past life influences, there have been a series of goddesses lining up with the North Node over these eight months, including Lilith, Hecate, Juno, Parvati and Kali in turn.

As the North Node reflect future potentials and visions, this is felt to me to be repeated invitations to own the different faces of the goddess, the sacred feminine, as the grand deconstruction and reconstruction of the Capricorn convergence continues. It’s been an invitation to get to know these parts of the divine feminine through whatever means inside ourselves.

And now we have the highest expression of the sacred masculine on the same North Node in Cancer, the sign of the Great Mother, a calling to now own more fully an expression of the masculine that has been purified by yogic fire (intense spiritual and therapeutic processes) and is simultaneously transformative, detached while deeply connected to the feminine, and profoundly tantric in the original meanings of the word.

In Cancer, Shiva shows a masculinity that is deeply connected to the Moon, to the serpent power, to wild and ecstatic sacred sexuality and who knows that he is incomplete without the Shakti, his feminine counterpart and consort, note that Kali and Parvati and their Western counterparts fill the above list.  (This image is clearly the opposite to the kind of toxic, misogynistic and destructive masculine so apparent across the globe at the moment, a form of masculinity whose foundations are slowly but progressively disintegrating, which is partially why it has become even more rabid and resistant to change!)

Shiva and the North Node are actually the spearheads of a fluid grand trine engaging the Neptune/ Black Moon conjunction in Pisces and, the conjunction of Lilith and Pallas Athena in Scorpio.

Here the sacred masculine forms brilliant energy lines with both the Great Mother and two of her fierce and focused spiritual warriors. There is some serious Shakti involved in this mutual joining of sacred masculine and feminine powers.

Consequently, the more ancient baggage you can release while engaging the heavy duty transits of this month, the closer you will get to the experience of the sacred marriage and, have greater opportunities to project this spiritual power into the world.

May the force be with you!
With love and blessings,
Daniel

(Just this morning, a fantastic call to own the sacred masculine appeared on my Facebook feed by Sean O’Faolain entitled MENS INITIATION – Awakening Healthy and Potent Masculinity, Femininity, Sexuality and Power within Men. Check it out as a reflection of the Shiva/North Node conjunction.