A First Quarter Moon of Launching Out and Staying Quiet

Wednesday evening's First Quarter Moon in the Moon's own sign of Cancer brings up the quiet side of all of us, while at the same time Mars in aspect to the Sun and Moon is slowing down and preparing to station to retrograde motion this coming Sunday. In addition, slow and stodgy Saturn is also strongly placed. All these factors seem to indicate that we are stopped in our tracks, just when we felt like we were getting somewhere; at the same time, however, the Sun in Aries in conjunction with Uranus and Eris is all about go-go-go! And this feeling of expansion and forward momentum symbolizes the urge to be heading off in unusual directions, to boot. So therefore what we find in this dynamic configuration are the distinctly paradoxical twin indications of stop-and-go, of three steps forward and two back (or is it the other way around?) One way to see this energy would be as tremendous forward momentum for going within, exploring the dark recesses at the innermost layers of our psyches, a passion for meditative internal exploration.

Supporting this latter idea is the fact that all three traditional outer planets are also emphasized in this quarter moon configuration, especially once you take the declinational aspects, the parallels and the contra-parallels, into account. As discussed previously in these blog pages, Saturn and stationing Mars are closely parallel to transformative Pluto. We find also that Jupiter is opposite and parallel to Neptune, as Jupiter itself is getting ready to station early next month, and that this slowing Jupiter is also in exact parallel with Uranus in its conjunction with Eris and the Sun. This makes for a great deal of creative imagination is the mix of cosmic energies, as evidenced in news stories such as that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently announced sweeping and idealistic plans for global connectivity, aiming at the entire world population of 7 billion souls, while a billionaire supporter of the SETI project is reported to be planning a fleet of 'nano spaceships' based on current technology to search for signs of intelligent life in the systems of nearby stars. Your own imagination is likely to be stimulated in these exciting times when not even the sky is apparently the limit.

The outer planets of Uranus Neptune and Pluto, and, now, Eris, take us out of our ordinary waking perception into something that seems strange to our normal consensus-oriented and simplistic rationality-bound intellectual process. The impulse that they represent brings us a taste of the vast, fecund and largely unknown area of the unconscious portion of the human psyche, that extra-dimensional part of life that mystics and shamans have long explored. This secret side of all of us, famously charted by Freud and Jung at the beginning of the previous century, just as Pluto, the last of the powerful triumvirate of these planetary archetypes was becoming known, opens us up to the possibility of greater life than we usually are willing to consciously recognize. Shakespeare, with all four of these numinous outer-planet archetypes emphasized in his own natal chart, his Sun being closely conjunct Eris, perhaps said it best when he famously stated that, "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy."

The Sabian Symbols for this First Quarter Moon have, as usual, something important to contribute. They are, for the Sun, in the 25th degree of Aries, "A double promise," which reminds us of the dual nature of mankind, as Devil and Angel, scheming animal brain and spiritual agent. Marc Edmund Jones remarks on this emblem that we must recognize the "unlimited capacity for seeing the world both inwardly and outwardly" referencing "the symbolical as well as the literal pertinence of everything that comes to [one's] attention." He goes on to state that there is in man "a facility of adjustment by which everything in a given situation may be brought to the fullest cooperation with everything else." And — we might add — given a meaning beyond the ordinary.

For the Moon, in the same degree of Cancer, we find the fascinating symbol "A dark shadow or mantle thrown suddenly over the right shoulder." Remembering that the right-hand side, 'dexter' in Latin, symbolically stands for normality and rationality, while the left-hand side, 'sinister' in Latin, represents the opposite, darkness and the occult, we can see in this emblem a reference to the unconscious, whose intimations of a fuller life can actually come over us at times quite suddenly. Jones remarks on, "the irrevocability of man's obligation to the reality of which he is a part," and "self-expression [as] a release of inner potentialities... genius vital to the general welfare." These are indeed the times of the emergence of more specific forms of spiritual awareness and understanding. And if we are to survive as individuals, and as a culture, it will take everything that we have on hand within ourselves to make the necessary leap of faith and adjustment to our current half-way means of thinking.