"Pagan fire worshippers dancing"

Overthrowing the arbitrary

This weekend, the Pisces new Moon begins the lunation that preceeds the heralded epic solar eclipse in April. This is the 4th of four major eclipse paths that cross the United States since 2012 (also in 2017 & 2023). This one is also conjunct Chiron while the U.S. is in its 5th Chiron return and preceeds by only days a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus in Taurus that hasn’t happened since 1941. Right.

You don’t have to know what any of that means to know that these are NOT ordinary times … at all! This isn’t just your ol’ run-of-the-mill craziness and corruption. NO, we — ALL of humanity and the whole of Mother Earth — are IN IT! We are IN the bottoming out of Kali Yuga and the simultaneous Great Turning of the Ages! This is no small “blip” in time but rather a HUGE cosmological shift that has been foretold for millenia! Regretfully, the awareness of these larger cycles and our place and purpose within them has been systematically obscured from our consciousness, thereby distorting our perceptions and hi-jacking the meanings and contributions of this wisdom.

But much, much more on that later. Back to the new Moon on Sunday …

As we observe the heavenly bodies move across the lens that is our sky, our Moon moves the fastest around our planet and around the zodiac. As it orbits the Earth every 29.5 days, we can perceive it as contributing important sentences to the larger cosmological story that continues to weave around the ecliptic. At times the Moon crosses the ecliptic (at the nodes) and sometimes the Moon is wildly “out of bounds” during lunar standstill seasons when it can be more than 5° north or south of the ecliptic. All of these points plus the constellations and signs have something to “say” or contribute to the overall story of us, of our planet and the age in which we live.

In his book, “360 Degrees of your Star Destiny - A Zodiac Oracle, ” Ellias Lonsdale writes a symbolic interpretation for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac wheel. The new Moon on Sunday occurs at 20°Pisces16’. Considering the Hermetic principle with which the Shamanic Astrology Paradigm™ is most resonant, “As above, so below,” I find this degree symbology quite timely and powerful both personally and collectively:

“Pisces 21

Pagan fire worshippers dancing

The surge of free spirits cutting loose. The need and desire for what has been held back to be entirely unleashed so that we can know what it really is. The impulse to overthrow whatever is arbitrary and restrictive in the community patterns. Championing the body’s wisdom in giving free expression to both what it has felt like to be so starkly enclosed and what we can become when we are granted the time and place for something vibrantly different to arise.

Yet a shadow tendency to keep hiding in safe containers, then calling forth another round of clearing the decks. A tremendously stubborn propensity for getting caught up in whatever is fascinatingly familiar and has been lived through for lifetimes.

The alternating pulse of going back under, into the old, familiar places, and feeling a wild desire to get through and beyond these now. A very strong experience of both polarities. Sometimes we project one of these onto the world around us, but we harbor both sides. We are very dramatically bound up in the dance between the tight and the loose, the contained and the unconstrained.

An undertow of a baffling kind. Why is it that we attract and fall for such obvious, thick cycles and worlds of engulfment? What keeps us in these so long? Why do we hold back on that ancient, earthly, psychic force of such power?

Well, we don’t wish to reenact being burned at the stakes, being at total odds with the ones around us. We need some realm of life to call our own, so we get wrapped up inside what promises to be cozy and safe and so often becomes primal bondage.

We know we can overthrow any and every limit when we need to. We push it pretty hard, building up to breaking point and beyond.”

Do you feel it? Does it hit home at all? Are there manifestations of this around us? Are people - me? you? - trying to break free but opt for comfort even when we know it does nothing for freeing our spirit?

This new Moon is an opportunity to unleash the ancient, earthly power that has been held back and allow “something vibrantly different to arise.’ If alternating between the familiar undertow and cutting loose is what has been needed to push hard to the breaking point, we can clear the decks of the “primal bondage” we’ve inhabited for lifetimes and follow the impulsive, wild desire to overthrow the arbitrary and dance around the fire.

This is a firey Pisces Moon causing the steam to rise that dissipates the thick cycles of watery, emotional patterns. Time to cut loose …