A Full Moon of Deceptive Revelation

Wednesday’s early morning Pisces Full Moon lands directly on numinous Neptune, about a degree away. This gives us all the chance for greater insight into this mysterious planetary archetype. It is also interesting to note that Neptune is the outer planet ruler of Pisces, so that you can think of this mid-week timing as a double-dose of Pisces energy, just as Mars also enters the opposite sign of Virgo. The Sun and Moon also aspect Pluto, by trine and sextile, reinforcing the Neptune-Pluto sextile that is one hallmark of this century – more on that below – while Jupiter moves into close opposition with the new planet, Eris, representing a Feminine Warrior energy for soul intention. Getting back to the major energy of this exciting Full Moon, the astrological archetype of Neptune is considered to be orthogonal to the physical plane, a vertical dimension that is literally out of this world, and hence, all bets are off. As noted Jungian psychologist Thomas Moore once stated, “the nature of the soul is paradox,” and when a truth about soul matters has a logical opposite, that statement is also true, so that we must learn to live with paradox, as anti-logical as this might seem. An example: God is dead, as once was enunciated with great cultural currency in the late sixties regarding the secularization and basic materialism of post-modern society; versus the statement that, indeed, “God is alive.” This latter is very much true as well. Neptune rules fuzzy logic, deception, self-deception, idealism, and a spiritual approach to life, as well as false or deceptive idealism. We are left wondering which end is up and must use the faculty of our own intuition to ultimately sort things out.

And here the good news is that our intuition is quite strong right now, in the wake of the extremely potent New Moon and solar eclipse that initiated this lunation cycle, last August 21st. Uranus was featured, by trine, the planet of the unexpected and of startling intuitional insight. This was called “the American eclipse,” because it was capable of being seen all the way across the U.S. and perhaps because the American government itself seems eclipsed at the moment. Indeed, the eclipse landed directly on the president’s Ascendant, although we have yet to see the true fallout from this event for him, personally, which could be up to six months away.

With Pluto also invoked, just as Pluto is within about three degrees of his sextile with Neptune, the closest they get to their major alignment together this year, we have the signpost of further societal transformation. The opening sextile of their conjunction of approximately 1890 remains active, and signals the major cultural shift of this century and the last. This is a 500-year cycle, and from here it is quite difficult to tell where we as a society will be even ten years from now. Of course this is partly because it is up to us, as we contemplate a future that we can actually live with, to make our ideas happen. And this is the message of the new planet, Eris, so crucial for our strange and fractious times. It is up to each one of us to articulate our most cherished ideal, and to act in a way that is fully aligned with that inner vision.

The Sabian Symbols for this Full Moon are as usual quite interesting. We have, for the Sun in the 14th degree of Virgo, “A family tree.” Marc Edmund Jones, the 20th century astrologer who brought these symbols into existence with the aid of noted psychic Elsie Wheeler, has this to say: “This is a symbol of the ever-effective dynamic with which an established tradition endows mankind…. [revealing to each person] an integrity peculiarly his or her own.” This is strikingly similar to the message of the new planet, Eris, which in fact turns out to be powerfully placed in Jones’ natal chart. For the Moon, in the same degree of Pisces, we find the initially mysterious, “A lady in fox fur,” which Jones likens to representing “the self’s assets in a positive light.” Because, in his book, he promotes the connection between exactly opposite degrees, such as at this Full Moon timing, he states, “This is a symbol of the ever-effective dynamic with which everyday custom endows mankind, [representing] an individual’s desire to be in style and to express opinions of momentary weight… [contributing] creative content to their own experience.” Indeed, we lose when we simply go with the crowd, and benefit greatly when we can come at the world from the standpoint of our own unique soul-level principles.