Star of David Quarter Moon

Monday's Last Quarter Moon is of great interest, in that it summarizes a powerful lunation cycle that has had an important Mercury Retrograde as well as many outer planet connections; it is also fascinating in that the Moon trines Venus to complete a grand sextile with Saturn, Neptune, Jupiter and Pluto. This inscribed six-pointed star within the circle of the Zodiac is a pattern also known as a Star of David. It is understandably rare and magical, and it actually consists of two interlocking grand trines, in Earth and in Water. Within these graceful flowing aspects it holds great promise for healing and peaceful energy as we end an intense month of July and take one further step toward what might in fact become a difficult fall period; punctuated as it is by another dose of Uranus and Pluto in their square formation, becoming exact on November 1st.

This Last Quarter Moon itself does not consist of entirely easy aspects. The Sun in Leo is square the Taurus Moon, and also squares Saturn in Scorpio. A T-square to the Sun, involving Saturn, implies that we are in for a somewhat difficult passage out of Mercury's retrograde shadow, that part of the retrograde period when Mercury is making up its lost Zodiacal longitude, its return to the degree of Cancer where it stationed at the end of June. Mercury escapes its retrograde shadow on August 4th, and until then certain vestiges of the usual symptoms will prevail, perhaps made stronger by the slowdown implied by strong Saturn: communication snafus and other mishaps and the failure of our own planning or of the mechanical and digital components on which we rely.

Simultaneously, and giving a preview of the November situation with Uranus perfectly in square with Pluto, Mars has moved along through Cancer to the point where it squares Uranus and opposes Pluto, each by a little over a degree. This aspect momentarily triggers these outer planet heavyweights, still in square, just not as close as they will be later on this year. We see all around us on the collective level the evidence of societal breakdown as we prepare for breakthrough; and we continue to see these effects in our own individual lives as well, effects that could be characterized as the chaos that precedes the birth.

The Sabian Symbol for this summer's Uranus in the 13th degree of Aries is comically scary: "An unsuccessful bomb explosion," which we must remember to take symbolically. For Pluto in the 10th degree of Capricorn the symbol is: "An albatross feeding from the hand," for which Marc Edmond Jones has "unusual success in dramatizing the potentialities of human nature." The albatross has come to be, for sailors, a sign of good luck; and we are all sailors.

The momentary Star of David appearing in these late July skies is a hopeful sign. Taken together with the message of these Sabian degree symbols, there forms a potent imagery of the role of free will in allowing historical opportunities to fulfill themselves. As we participate by engaging the material that we have to work with, along with the cosmic energies and the current state of consciousness of the surrounding society, we can cooperate with these factors and with each other to make something successful, if we truly try.