The Harvest Moon and partial Lunar Eclipse in Pisces exacted at 10:44pm EST last night, with Luna reflecting the late Virgo Sun.  Implicitly a full moon, and now in its waning gibbous phase through Aries, this lunation lit up the Virgo/Pisces axis and announced the sun’s last few days in the sign of the Harvest Maiden, as well as the next couple years of eclipses along said sign axis.  This staring contest between the Lights, from ‘Wealth’ to ‘Satiety’ as per the Book of Thoth — with a fullness partially obscured, for me stirred the sense that gains and losses in the external world do not always perfectly mirror the inner riches we might draw from them.

Indeed, the Moon knows all about gain and loss…

… and I don’t just mean the slow seeping away of human life-force, as many of us sit stuck to our screens in little abstract boxes of the ‘digital opioid’-sickened hivemind, making identities of compartmentalized outrage ’til they rot on planet Amazon…

That too —  but I mean particular, triumphant, joyful gains and particular, heart-wrenching, bone-aching loss… the real, substantial kind, had front and center, the EMF-laden doomscroll more a means or a footnote.

Eclipses take place along or near the degrees of the lunar nodes, which move naturally retrograde through the zodiac with the ‘wobble’ of the Moon’s axis at about 18 months per sign polarity.  While the school of thought characterizing Evolutionary Astrology frames the North Node as representing ‘narratives one is moving toward in this life’ and South Node placements as ‘narratives one is moving away from or discarding’ — a mode of interpretation that borrows a bit ambiguously from reincarnation theory, but can be powerful within particular divinatory frameworks — the most widely shared quality of nodal interpretation, from Hellenistic Greece to the Vedantas, is that the North represents ‘increase’ and the South ‘decrease.’

This is something that traditional Hellenistic astrology and Vedic astrology share a bit more, at least in broad strokes.  The North Node evokes ease of material manifestation, but sometimes excess appetite for this.  The South Node tends to be less favorable for external manifestation, but can bring spiritual wealth in lessons derived therefrom.

As such, eclipses can highlight these peak periods of gain and loss — and across varyingly visible arenas of life.  Whereas solar eclipses take place on new moons, when both the astrological Sun and Moon occupy the same sign and house of a chart, lunar eclipses take place on full moons, when they sit in opposite signs and therefore houses of a chart… a proper staring contest — a crisis of integration.  And eclipses of all sorts are already known for provoking events of unpredictable tempo compared with other astrological phenomena.

With the North Node still presently at 6° Aries, and the South Node at 6° Libra, this particular eclipse was a bit different from the majority, in that it took place across the late degrees of Pisces and Virgo, the sign axis ’ahead’ of them.  These changes and eclipse ripples have a mutable, fluid, shifting dimension as per the Fish and the Maiden’s namesake signs, with our desires, gains and adjustments in the external world finding varied alignment or contrast with our senses of fulfillment and satiety…

… but the nodes themselves are still in Aries/Libra, speaking a cardinal seesaw: the paradox of individual realization versus relational harmony and upset, plotting forward versus maintaining equilibrium, and navigating singular/collective identities amidst this dance of impermanence.

To make things more exceptional, the pull of this Lunar Eclipse in Pisces posed itself from between Saturn and Neptune, which have been transiting the sign for some time, so “where you’ve already had restructuring, dissolving, possible breakdowns before working to make new dreams a reality, the eclipse throws in a wildcard factor on top, potentially moving things along at an unexpected pace or with unforeseen pieces of the puzzle,” as the astrologer Leisa Schaim illuminated.

What’s more, the instinctual pull of Mars in Cancer, sign of its fall, colored the eclipse as the red planet squared the nodes, now moving past this aspect and further across Cancer’s first decan, a face of the sign called ‘Love’ in the Book of Thoth.

With Mars ruling the North Node, and Venus ruling the South, we must face the reality that every choice holds an implicit violence.  A door is walked through, another closes.  In simply taking a step forward, millions of microorganisms are crushed underfoot.  There might be a sacrifice here, of love, beauty, pleasure or comfort for a more frictional way forward.  Mars in Cancer rides a wave of nurture and aggression, and where these dynamics can uncomfortably intersect.  The astrologer Diana Rose Harper described Mars in Cancer as “raging against the insufficiency of care” — a phrase I find more than powerful in describing this placement, as do the Mars in Cancer folk in my life.

In fact, I brought this up while chatting with my longtime friend Elodie St. Onge-Aubut of 9th House Astrology, who commended my recommendation of the artist Sadie Shoaf / @sandyloaf of Three Pigs Vintage in Pittsburgh, an artist whose visual aesthetics at times indulge the clown archetype, but with elegant retro-fitted and gothic overtones.  Elodie sent me a recent video of hers, done for the song “All Two of Us” by Black Moth Super Rainbow, and exclaimed her enjoyment of it.  She then went on to bring up Stephen King, a Mars in Cancer rising and his “whole trip with clowns” to which I replied:

“It’s curious, the trickster, jester, and clown archetypes with their different attributions. I often fancy Mercury/Gemini to be more the Trickster, Jupiter/Sagittarius to be more the Jester.  But there’s something about the Cancer/Capricorn axis and the Clown, or at least certain placements therein.  Adam Elenbaas has written of the Clown and Saturn.  Mars in Cancer’s connections to the Clown seem to concern subverted comfort, or the desire to entertain, connect or please, poorly masking a wounded inner child or the like.

In Stephen King’s ‘It’ there’s Pennywise as symbol of repressed childhood trauma, which is very Mars in Cancer, or like Diana Harper put it that kind of ‘raging against the insufficiency of care’ made manifest in a kind of Mars in Cancer sadomasochism.”

If not the ‘wounded inner child’ — an archetype most humans inherently relate to at some point or another, in a psychologically ‘soul-making’ kind of way — the capacity to feel joy and the need to nourish our inner life may be reasons for some of the sacrifices beckoned by the present astrology.

Where do we feel cared for?  In what ways do we not feel seen, nourished, attended to?  How do we sit with these things?  And how do we move with them, reconciling expedited growth and shedding of skin with the necessary toll it might take on what was once familiar in our lives?

The lunar month that’s elapsed since the last full moon on August 19th felt longer to me than many other arcs of this calendar year… one that’s held myriad twists and pivots.  Perhaps it’s been the revisionary pull of multiple retrogrades, reifying a whirlwind of transits amidst the ‘gateway’ planets Jupiter and Saturn, both in mutable signs.  But from full moon to full moon, there is a prevalent theme of cutting out things that do not feel aligned with our innermost selves, our most impassioned callings — or where difficult sacrifices must be made in honoring our gut instincts.

As such, it’s possible that recent weeks have brought changes in relationship landscapes based on what feels aligned with our own personal paths and inner work.  Venus’ transit through Virgo, from August 4th to August 29th, saw the planetary Aphrodite in the sign of its fall preceding Mars’ present and extended time in its own.  There have been kinder astrologies as go human relations — moving from a Venus sign of critique, recipe adjustments and rope bottoms, Venus departed its fall at August’s end for its yang home of Libra, before encountering the South Node and beckoning a different flavor of reconfiguration.  Sometimes, ‘loss is more.’

On September 22nd, Venus will depart its yang home of Libra for its detriment in Scorpio — a place of sultry and quietly ravenous stares that sees relational harmony steeped in often dark emotions, from passionate to covetous.  While Venus transits this temple through October 17th, Mars continues to embark on this long journey through its fall of Cancer, spanning September 4th through April 17th — a drama that will be embellished when the red planet enters Leo on November 3rd, stations retrograde December 6th, and reenters Cancer January 6th.  Mars will not reenter Leo until April 18th.  Whoosh.

So it’s likely that our exploration of needs for nurture, belonging, fulfillment and satiety are to be turned over in the light again and again across the next several months. What these themes might look like, what strata of life they show up in, how we adapt to them, however… is likely to feel more changeable than usual.  The recent trine from Venus in Libra to Jupiter in Gemini, while demonstrating its airiness, also adds to our conversational capacity surrounding desire and growth moving forward, pirouettes toward finer footing in smoother stretches.

Just some themes to feel around for…

*gain and loss
*outward manifestation versus inner satiety and fulfillment
*the paradox of individual realization versus relational harmony and upset
*plotting forward versus maintaining equilibrium
*navigating singular and collective identities
*the question as to where one feels safe, nurtured, witnessed, or understood
*desires, gains and adjustments in the external world finding varied alignment or contrast with our senses of fulfillment and satiety
*the sense that outer losses can yield inner riches
*the need to make changes to or excise relationships to better honor our own path
*operating from a place of instinct more than reason, or vice-versa depending on what kind of head we’re thinking with
*working hard to build one’s capacity to feel joy in an overstimulated world
*subverted comfort; the desire to connect or please, alchemizing or masking a wounded inner child
*dramas and desires that seem to shift with the phases of the moon
*will making changes to one’s more external life life ‘fill the cup,’ or will these changes come as a reflection of the inner knowing that I can fill my own?
*in making adjustments to my external world, in all its physical details and relational dynamics, do I feel satisfied, or do the problems lie deeper within?

Look for the spoken recording of this article on my podcast channel by tomorrow.  As always, swim well stargazers ~

—A.B.