A New Moon Time of Transformation

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Henry Seltzer of ASTROGRAPH.COM

Thursday's Virgo New Moon opposes Chiron and closely aspects Uranus, continuing the series of recent powerful lunations that trigger the forming next installment of the Uranus-Pluto square. A prominent Saturn additionally emphasizes the Earth element. Then, the mutable and mental qualities of Virgo are also reinforced, since Mercury, located in this same sign of Virgo, which it rules, aligns in semi-sextile aspect to Venus and in parallel to Uranus. As Pluto slows down this month, stationing to direct motion on the 20th, and as Uranus draws ever closer to the exact 90-degree perfection of their square aspect, due on November 1st, Chiron and Saturn both contribute to the closing vice grips of this radically revolutionary alliance.

Saturn is moving into perfect sextile with Pluto as he stations. This connection becomes closer over the first two weeks of the current lunation cycle that is launched with this New Moon. Saturn with Pluto implies a more dire take on the dramatic structural changes already symbolized by Pluto's continued presence in Saturn's own sign of Capricorn. Since Pluto in turn co-rules Scorpio, these two difficult energies are also in an interlocking configuration with each other, known as mutual reception. The walls are coming down, perhaps more quickly during this end-of-year timing than we would ever have imagined.

Chiron, the Wounded Healer, is also prominent in these fall-trending skies, and is particularly strongly aspected in this September lunation cycle. This might speak to the pain and the difficulty of these times as far as being able to digest rapid change. There are those that take to future shock like a duck to water; and then there are those who move more slowly. In any case, radical change is in the air so that we all do well to remain as open as possible to whatever might come down. The highlighted presence of Chiron also suggests that, in our metamorphosis, it is our most deeply wounded places inside us that become an important focal point of our process. We each of us have within ourselves sensitive places, the residue of early childhood trauma, that benefit from greater recognition and acceptance as we transform.

Mystical and slippery Neptune is also triggered in the New Moon configuration through a quincunx from Mars. This month of September is therefore conjectured to be a shape-shifting time, when our situation must be perused from all angles, and when many different facets of the ordinary — and of otherworldly numinousity — will reveal themselves.

The Sabian symbol for Saturn's degree in Scorpio, the 8th, is: "The moon, shining across a lake," for which Marc Edmond Jones has "an absolute and usually unsuspected mastery over the forces and exigencies of life and nature." We can bring the symbolism of both Neptune and Saturn into this picture, with the lake, its watery motif intensified by the moonlight, coming together with the implied mountain scenery signifying the earthly foundation principle represented by Saturn.

We truly live in a world that is part grounded reality and part mystical training ground, inhabiting our bodies like cloaks, spirits in a material world who are at least partially unknown to ourselves. As we morph and grow, along with the transformative nature of these times, we need to honor both sides. It is of immeasurable comfort to realize, as we go through the practicality of necessary changes, that from the perspective of another dimension all of this was somehow foreordained, long ago and far away.