A Last Quarter Moon to Remember and Meditate On

The exciting news about Tuesday's Last Quarter Moon, besides coinciding with Election Day in the U.S., is that ninety minutes before its moment of exact, Mercury stations retrograde at 4-plus of Sagittarius in trine with trickster Uranus. This quarter Moon is itself quite strong, in that the Sun and Moon occupy the power degrees of the middle of the Fixed Signs, at 15 degrees of Scorpio and 15 degrees of Leo, respectively. It is very unusual to have two such powerful events so close together, and it presages a difficult time of reassessment and reevaluation, which are in any case the hallmarks of this lunar phase. Dane Rudhyar called the last quarter phase a "crisis in consciousness" when things that have been unclear in the past, or brushed under the rug, need to come up for reconsideration and enlightenment.

Since Mercury stations also at this time, in close aspect to Uranus, and in square to Chiron in Pisces, we might add the concept of sudden or even surprising enlightenment; a figure-ground reversal that in an instant changes everything that we thought we knew about ourselves or perhaps regarding the relationship with a significant person in our lives. If there are situations within our field of activity at which we have been needing to take a closer look, now is the time. This is especially true regarding those places inside ourselves where we find that we have hidden reactions based on prior unacknowledged wounding, usually the residue of early trauma. With Neptune so prominent in the current month's configurations, this is in any case a prime time to meditate and to look to the inside, as I have been indicating in the monthly column for November.

There are implications of this timing for the United States Presidential election. There has been no lack of the unexpected this year in the run-up to the final vote tally, including an "October surprise" directly from the mouth of Mother Nature that turned out to allow the president some breathing room in the polls. This powerful configuration quarter Moon indicates, however, that Hurricane Sandy hitting the East Coast is by no means the end of the surprises. With Mercury switching directions on Election Day, and bearing in mind the snarl of motivations and vitriol as well as the plethora of deceptive statements that we have seen thus far, it is not unlikely that just as in the election of 2000, the official results of this election will not be available until many weeks after the polls close.

The Sabian Symbol for Mercury's station in Sagittarius is "An old owl up in a tree," which might be taken as yet another plea for wisdom and discernment. With the tenor of the times, the potential is there for either deliberate deception, or else for self-deception in our impetuous enthusiasm for espousing our ideals. We all have been there, in love with a situation or with one take on things that clouded our judgment until the penultimate moment of sudden recognition; and that is what we are all facing right now.

With Tuesday's event we switch gears to a more internal and meditative mode. It is therefore doubly important that we proceed now with discernment, regarding the life of the collective and with regard to our personal lives as well; or at least with all the discernment that we can muster.