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Full Moon in Libra

Tuesday, April 7, 2020 7:35 PM

7:35 PM PDT, April 7, 2020

2:35 AM UTC, April 8, 2020


As Above, So Below, As Within, So Without

We are here. We are at the turning point in our evolution. We have been stopped, in our tracks. In our obsession to produce and consume more, to “be best”, we are facing an act of Nature that puts a wrench in the machine of humanity’s rapacious race toward “progress” or what Nature is calling, extinction. Whether the virus was created in a lab, or is, as a friend put it, is “the revenge of the pangolins,” whatever its origins, the fact remains, we are in it.

Depth astrology takes into consideration the maxim “as above, so below”. While this is meant to portray the movement of the planets as analogous to human events in physical reality, it also conveys the perspective that what is happening here on Earth is the result of our collective dreaming. That our reality is the product, the result of our collective imagination. Everything that takes place here in physical reality first was created in the imagination, in the world of the archetypes.

As we look at the movements of our archetypal representations, the planets, astrologers see there patterns we recognize as having occurred historically, as well as from our personal experience. Indigenous peoples, the Maya, the Hopi among others, have prophesied this coming moment. Astrologers also knew this had to happen. No one knew exactly how it would happen, but Nature has had her say.

Not for over 700 years have Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter been all conjoined in Capricorn. Jupiter and Pluto conjoin once in 13 years or so, (their last conjunction was the Great Recession of 2007-8) but in the sign of Capricorn, the last time was 1771. This year, Jupiter will make three conjunctions with Pluto, the mythic god of death and regeneration, on 4/4*, 6/29, and 11/12, 2020 (just after Election Day in the US, where they will be EXACTLY conjoined, to the minute, with the asteroid Pallas Athena, as well as being joined again by Saturn).  Jupiter and Pluto have not made three conjunctions in Capricorn in the same year since 1285.

Jupiter is our expansive “can do” energy, but also rules our connections with our spiritual nature, our inner knowledge that we are a kind of god/goddess in human form. Pluto’s presence exposes the dark underbelly of our relationship to being powerful. Humanity has become so inflated with its powers that we have lost our humility, our perspective, our sense of balance, which this Full Moon in Libra embodies.  In the sign of Capricorn, which Saturn rules, we are learning lessons, being taken to task, becoming aware of how inadequate our collective world view has become. Or, one could say, our karma has run over our dogma.

The themes of feminine and masculine archetypal forces predominate in this chart, and other important event charts all year. As mentioned, Pallas/Athena, the feminine, wise warrior who is an equal to her male counterparts, is conjoined with each of the Jupiter/Pluto unions, a telling sign that we must acknowledge and integrate the long-denigrated feminine power in order to work our way through the mess we’ve made of our world. She has become shadow, and unacknowledged shadow makes for deadly trouble. As we spoke of in the New Moon blog of 3/25 dark Moon Lilith is still “in bed” with Chiron, asking to be healed of her gaping bleeding wounds, the wounds to the mother planet who hosts us.

This Full Moon (a powerful super-Moon, at its closest approach to the Earth) in Venus-ruled Libra, the sign of peacemaking, relationship, and forgiveness, forms challenging squares to Jupiter/Pluto/Athena, suggesting that we need to learn how to form a relationship to this phase of our transformation. Can we let go of blame, and forgive debts, both economic and emotional? Venus is now conjoined with the asteroid Vesta. Vesta signifies our hearth, the place where we come back to our central focus in life. Venus/Vesta in Gemini asks us to focus upon our thinking patterns, and since these two are in a trine relationship to Saturn and Mars, to actively pursue and re-structure how and where our negative thinking puts us into fear-based realities. Vesta strongly in trine to Chiron suggests that here is where healing can happen. We must be aware and wash our hands. But we must also learn to “clean” our fears, put them into perspective. We’re being forced to stay at home, to clean our hearth, to sit with it, learn from it, learn respect for what it has to offer us.

Our science-based, technological world has developed as a result of a strongly cognitive and archetypally masculine culture, and is valuable within a certain range of phenomena. But its counterpart, or shadow,  is the individual and collective soul, psyche, imagination, and our feeling states, which have their own logic, and recognizable patterns of manifestation. Unacknowledged soul brings dis-ease, obsession, violence and disconnection from the life force.  The patriarchal religions have failed us in that we’ve lost touch with the very important non-physical and non-rational parts of ourselves, seeing God as separate from ourselves and the biosphere. In our binary thinking, translating our experience into 0’s and 1’s, we’ve de-emphasized soul, which is our origin. We all have come here from the inner worlds of psyche, and will return there as well. Death, as a profound and ineluctable presence now, reminds us of this bridge which we all must cross. Pluto’s strong presence in our lives also brings us the opportunity to “practice dying” as Plato said, to become more aware of the need to re-structure how we use our powers, how we hold the gifts that being alive and physical have to offer us. To do this, we are being pushed to forgo “doing” and enter “being,” going within, to explore Pluto’s Underworld, and, like Persephone, to come back to the world of light with gifts, maturity and courage.

*For you numerologists, the Jupiter/Pluto conjunction happened in Hawaii on 4/4, at 4:44 pm.

All charts here are using Natural House system: i.e. the Ascendant is always at 0˚ of Aries.