A Full Moon of Darkness and Light

Thursday late evening's Scorpio Full Moon, coming along in the small hours of Friday morning for the East Coast and Europe, is another intense configuration. This is largely due once again to the powerful outer-planet presences that have been featured in almost every recent lunation. In particular, within a couple of degrees of 21-plus of their respective signs, we find Venus, Uranus, and Eris, in Aries, in close triple conjunction, a stationing Mercury in Taurus coming into extremely close parallel with Saturn and Pluto, and the Moon's nodal axis itself, at 21 degrees of Pisces and Virgo. These multiple connections between inner and outer planets bring up the latter's essentially transpersonal and transformative nature, where we are encouraged to see what lies deep within the unconscious portions of our psyches and to act on this numinous and other-dimensional understanding. Mars, newly retrograde, remains parallel to Saturn and Pluto as well, creating his own triumvirate of difficult and quite specifically internal energies. Casting our net wider, we find that Jupiter is square to Saturn, and in perfect parallel to Uranus, to the minute of a degree of declination. Jupiter is also trine Pluto and closely opposed, as well as contra-parallel, to Neptune. With Jupiter thus so strongly invoked, while remaining on the opposite side of the Zodiac from all these others, we have a surprising note of starry-eyed optimism that somehow enters into the picture of this dynamic and darkly resonant Full Moon, bringing in the lighter as well as the darker side of the human condition.

And what do we make of the darkness? In the purely rational and judgmental tendencies within us, characteristic of consensus linear thinking, we run from it; while in the mystical traditions that are becoming more accepted within the burgeoning transformational consciousness movement, we attempt to embrace it. This was an important factor in the archetypal psychology articulated by C.G. Jung in the early years of the 20th Century, and, two hundred years earlier than that, by William Blake in his famous dictum that "everything that lives is holy." Even those parts of ourselves that are flawed, cracked or potentially shameful we can and must acknowledge and accept within ourselves if we are to make progress toward greater wholeness. This is echoed in Jung's work that was only published within the past few years, The Red Book, in which he made a point of acknowledging the darkness as well as the light within the depths of the human psyche. In this self-revealing private annotated journal, he wrote "Judgment must fall from you, even taste, above all, pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate... only you stop yourself from looking and from living."

When Mercury retrogrades one week later on, at the 23 degree mark of Taurus, thus making a close sextile with Chiron, the Wounded Healer, in Pisces, with Eris at the degree of their midpoint, there will be still further opportunities to explore what we hold deep inside ourselves, including inner wounding, and based on renewed understanding turn dysfunctional patterns within us into light-filled compassion and soul-level intention. This is indicated also by the exciting presence in these current skies, both then and now, of Jupiter in exact parallel with Uranus. We have available to us all the profound intuitional awareness and brilliant epiphanies that we need. They will see us through to the extent that we can open to these deep places within us. We win when we welcome the wisdom of the interior portion of our psyches, intimations of our Higher Self, to the table of our more mature understanding.

In closing, the Sabian Symbols for this Full Moon are well-worth mentioning. They are, for the Sun in the third degree of Taurus, in an invocation of the natural world, "Steps up to a lawn blooming with clover." Marc Edmund Jones refers to "creative optimism," and "the indomitable outreaching of the human spirit on the side of a possible and profitable cooperation with the natural universe." For the Moon, in the same degree of Scorpio, we find the equally optimistic symbol, "A house-raising." Jones relates this to "the individual's realization of his [or her] own inherent divinity as one seeks fulfillment through [community]." Indeed we need each other, and profoundly so, if we are to actualize the highest within us and reach for that societal and personal understanding that will take us beyond our current straits. And it may be only by working with the dark and painfully hidden parts of ourselves that we will come to the ultimate wholeness that we unconsciously seek.

A Full Moon of Darkness and Light

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Chart for the Full Moon on April 21, 2016

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