The Full Snow Moon in Leo exacted at 8:53am ET on the morning of Wednesday, February 12th, 2025, staring down the Sun in Aquarius, reflecting our star in its detriment, the sign of its exile.  The fixed yang signs of Leo and Aquarius sing a contrast, one of ‘radiating from the inside out and looking from the outside in’ — warmth and cool, closeness and distance, centrality and periphery, emergence and exile, belonging and banishment.

It must be emphasized that the signs of Cancer and Leo, home of the Moon and Sun, are naturally opposed by Capricorn and Aquarius, homes of Saturn — furthest planet from the Sun visible to the naked eye.  Between them on either side are the home signs of Mercury and Jupiter in natural opposition, as well as Venus and Mars in opposition the same.  Just as the Sun and Moon give and reflect light, it is in Saturn’s domiciles across the wheel, their familiarity with cold, limitation, death, dissolution, melancholy and grief, that we understand Saturn as the gateway planet between seen and unseen worlds; a guard who witnesses what passes into and out of form, where life is breathed onto bones and loss brings dissolving of structure.

These qualities stand in stark contrast to Leo as center of summer’s held breath… Leo’s loyalism rebels against the summer’s fading light, just as Aquarius’ futurism holds a promethean flame as light slowly returns.  Where Cancer nurtures home and hearth, engendering bonds of continuity, Capricorn’s sensory seeking anticipates loss and demise, fortifying accordingly.

At present, Mercury is separating from a conjunction with the Sun, where the pair made a square to Uranus in Taurus, throwing excited twists and erratic loops in communication and day-to-day happenings.  Whether favorable or more frictional, some conversations, agreements, arrangements and such are going quite differently now than they were just two or three days ago.  This conjunction also marked Mercury’s emergence as ‘morning star’ and so the time of day the swift planet will be most visible.

While this Full Moon took place midway through the third decan (10°) of the Leo/Aquarius axis, it is the first decan of Aquarius that I will now emphasize — one which has seen a fitting amount of focus for a few years now.  The New Moon two weeks ago was preceded just days by the first Sun/Pluto conjunction in Aquarius since the unseen planet first flirted with the fixed air sign this time around nearly two years ago, just after the Spring Equinox.  Three weeks ago, we had the first Sun/Pluto conjunction in Aquarius since 1779, Pluto’s 248-year orbit a phenomenon mirrored by the average length of a human empire.

Sun/Pluto conjunctions cast a certain plain light upon that which was uncomfortably hidden — the greed, lust, shame, taboo, violence, detritus of psychological suppression, veins of hushed riches and that which is extracted from the most shadowed of places.  Pluto is like an underwater pressure-cooker, and contacts of this slow-moving prince of darkness to the Sun or Moon in one’s chart can make the ego identity or the heart feel like a house of cards.  For the Sun to move over Pluto’s degree point for a day, newly into Aquarius for a continuous 19-year stay, held an energy that seemed to nearly subsume the New Moon days later — which is why I didn’t even write much on said lunation, keeping to my own perch of observation amidst swirling world events.

While some might find it obscure to apply traditional ‘minor dignities’ to outer planets, one might recall what Austin Coppock observed when Pluto first darted into the fixed air sign of Aquarius for a few months in Spring of 2023.  The first decan (or 10° period) of Aquarius, a Saturn-ruled sign, is Venus-ruled, and at this time conversation in the western media featured a particular concern rather prominently: not just AI, but the ability of AI to steal artistic likeness, whether the visages and voices of actors, or the writing and art of every working artist, undermining wealth and creative wellbeing.  Distinctly venusian concerns.

What kind of sociopolitical pulse and conversational currents were we faced with in the West when Pluto finally reentered Aquarius on November 19th, 2024 ‘for good’ this time, an uninterrupted two decades to come?  A young man named Luigi Mangione purportedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, prompting a wave of voyeuristic media reaction as the American public followed the ensuing manhunt — pockets of approval for his actions seeming to hinge partly on the accused Mangione’s good looks, but more so the collective (and bipartisan) recognition that unaffordable healthcare rates have more or less killed all manner of U.S. citizens’ loved ones.

The breadth of reaction was incredible, and exhibited a starker divide (Saturn) in societal harmony (Venus) — the particular reality of murder, loss of life, a widow and fatherless children is awful.  And yet somehow, the overarching symbolism of such a killing occurred to voters on both ends of America’s false binary of a political spectrum — elder women sat knitting, even some who voted in alignment with the Right’s sympathy to the ultra-rich, like, “he couldn’t of killed one more?”

The zeitgeist of that week was as though the American public were momentarily united beyond partisanship in acknowledging the sadness of such a murder and the symbolic importance of it the same.  Polls have shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that healthcare profits and coverage denial were partially responsible for the killing, an attribution that transcends party lines.

There is a quote that has been varyingly attributed to dictators and conquerors from Josef Stalin to Napoleon Bonaparte, stating, “the death of one man is tragedy; the death of millions of men is only a statistic.”  We grieve the particular loss, but some deaths are beyond the heart’s scope — either in number, or degrees of removal from our own lives.  Fitting then, that Napoleon was a Leo with Moon in Capricorn, keenly aware of the distance between the heart’s sphere of perception and the cold reality of death, even sacrifices for a ‘collective’ cause.  (But -which- collective?)

… or is it more fitting that the correct attribution of this quote is to neither Stalin nor Napoleon, but likely to the German journalist, writer and social critic Kurt Tucholsky, a Capricorn with a Leo Moon… exhibiting that same keen awareness of the spirited heart and the cold indifference that seems to cradle us in perfect paradox, at once animated and void.

Just some of the themes to look out for:

*belonging and alienation, acceptance and denial
*impassioned or erratic dialogues
*mental sharpness, mobilized in new directions
*’winds of change are not so precise in where they land things’
*like that CSNY lyric “when everyone’s talking, and nobody’s listening…”
*following the first Sun/Pluto conjunction since 1779, things once hidden feel as though they are beginning to emerge
*distraction, newspeak, doublethink as tactics in drugging political opposition
*with Venus in Aries, empowerment and emboldenment of the feminine
*more passion than peace
*with Mars in its fall of Cancer trine to Saturn in Pisces, passive-aggressiveness and covert ways of communicating can inflict a more insidious violence
*”being non-confrontational can serve a different level of manipulation”
*with Neptune still on the North Node, the embodied belief of delusions and fervent dedication to them
*sorting the relative merits of different truths, and the difficulty in doing so
*remembering that the word ‘apocalypse’ means “unveiling”

Revolution is quite interesting!  Swim well, stargazers ~

—A.B.

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