1:49 pm  AHST  04/23/2024
   4:49 pm    PST  04/23/2024
   7:49 pm    EST  04/23/2024
   12:49 am   GMT 04/24/2024

When I first looked at this chart, I was reminded of the Top 40 radio shows where the announcer says, “and the hits just keep on coming!”

First there was the Lunar Eclipse on March 25^th, an emotionally charged lunation. After that, the double whammy of a Solar Eclipse, blended with Chiron, during Mercury retrograde. Then just two days ago, the most important Jupiter/Uranus conjunction, the first in 14 years. We’re still reeling from those major energetic downloads. Now comes this Scorpio Full Moon, with no aspects (angles) to the Sun/Moon, only a tension-filled T-square¹ to Pluto, the ruler of Scorpio! With no aspects to the other planets, there are no release points to help us balance the energy, except for us to look head-on at what a Pluto T-square is asking us to face.

Scorpio energies are some of the most powerful and the most intense of the zodiac. A fixed water sign, fixed feelings and emotions, Scorpio energies deal with the deepest and most hidden parts of our psyche, many of which were embedded during our earliest years, and even perhaps before that, in our DNA and ancestral lineage. Those buried energies almost always engender our emotional reactions to the challenges of our lives, which inevitably involve anger, shame, fear, revenge, and a host of other shadowy qualities.

However, the emotions and deep feelings are also a source of our power, and Scorpio deals with the ultimate and potent qualities of transformation. If any sign inherently knows the power and depth of the life force, it’s Scorpio.

With the T-square to Pluto, we can talk in terms of its “transformational” power, but Pluto also holds the darkest of dark forces that humanity can manifest. It’s the underworld,  though in ancient thought, Pluto was the guardian of the riches that were underground (like gold) it is also the place where we bury what we don’t want to look at in ourselves.

During this time of a worldwide paradigm shift, a Great Turning as Joanna Macy calls it, all the darkest parts of our psyche are made visible, in order that we become conscious of the destructive elements in our psyche, to know what being powerful is like when it goes “astray”. This Full Moon shines brightly on our cruelty, our destructive behaviors, our sexual or material obsessions. When possessed by overwhelming powerful archetypal forces, we can lose perspective, everything is seen in black and white, good or evil, which is the basis of fascist thinking of governments. Everything is split into yes or no, and we forget that each of us contains the elements of the “other” and that we all have the potential to act in destructive ways. Pluto at its darkest rules megalomania and tyranny.

The Sun has entered Taurus. This is supposed to be a time of grounding in the earth-bound activities, tilling the soil, planting seeds, weathering rainy days and looking for things to sprout. Taurus is governed by Venus, and is a time when we appreciate the beauty of the world around us, and want to make our lives safe and secure, also Taurean traits. While spring is beginning is the Northern hemisphere, flowers are blooming anew, yet we are also overwhelmed by the destructive acts that are going on in the Middle East. This is the Taurus/Scorpio polarity blasting us now with its paradoxical presence.

How do we integrate these disturbing and despairing visions of what men and their militaries do to each other? We cannot discount the fact that we are constantly making more and more machineries of destruction worldwide, every day our factories churn out more. In theater, it’s said if there’s a gun on the stage at the beginning of a play, someone is going to get killed. And it’s the same on the world stage. What are we thinking we’re doing with all our weapons of mass destruction? We cannot keep using the materials of the already depleted Earth to create more and more weaponry, the activities of which are essentially raping the planet. We must learn to face our fears, our paranoia, our obsessive need to control, or our Mother Earth will take us all out.

What do we do when faced with such shadow material in our reality? We have to take it into ourselves, accepting that this is our darkness, each of us, knowing this is our task, to humble ourselves before the possibility that we’d also misuse power if given the chance, even if we were to do it righteously, as each side now in their wars believes. Meeting the darkness with eyes open, we become no longer fearful of it, and when we encounter it in others, we can act as mitigators, to help them accept it in themselves. As I see it, this is our work.

And speaking of bringing the darkness and the light together, the chart shows us that Venus and Eris are both conjoined at 23˚ of Aries. Venus, the goddess of beauty, art, and the pleasure of our bodies, is in bed with Eris, the goddess of strife and discord. We are certainly in an historic period of global upheaval, cultures clashing, technology and AI versus personal human values, etc.. Eris’s energy is asking us to unmask hypocrisy, to look at what is valuable and to discard our self-importance and narcissism, while Venus is asking us to stand up for the feminine in ourselves, and for women’s rights worldwide.

Also a strong presence in this chart is Saturn and Mars in Pisces. Mars will conjoin Neptune on the 28^th of April. If Mars represents our individual desire to take action, as it enters the field of Neptune’s gigantic and overwhelming realm of the unconscious, it dissolves, and in the process it becomes something larger than itself. Coming together every two years, Mars and Neptune have been doing this spiritual initiation in Pisces since 2013. This month will be the last time they conjoin in Pisces for the next 164 years.

After the conjunction’s initiation is done, Mars will emerge and be reborn in its own sign of Aries on May Day, May 1^st, which is Beltane, as well as a host of other ancient celebrations which mark the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere. This event to me represents a finishing up of old, old karmic threads that need to be re-woven into a new tapestry, one that we all weave together, regardless of who or what we are or have been. Can we release the Mars archetype as the God of War and remake it into the God of Strength? — the actions and strength that we need in order to heal — each other and the planet beneath our feet.

In order to get there, we need to symbolically go through a death and rebirth of the old egoic way (me first) of operating in the world. For the next two weeks until the next New Moon in Taurus, we have some navigating to do, as we all go through Pluto’s underworld journey of grief, loss, transformation, and regeneration.

¹ A T-square is two planets which are opposed to each other, and forming right angles to a third planet. Often thought of as our “cross to bear”.