Last Quarter Moon: Into the Eclipse

For those looking for a horoscope interpretation of the eclipse, one version is in the July monthly horoscope, which is offered to all readers free this month (the monthly horoscopes are included with all subscriptions to Planet Waves or Next World Stories). A much more detailed version is contained in the Midyear Horoscope Report, which offers about 750 words per sign and a long introduction to the current sequence of eclipses. In addition, Next World Stories gives a detailed report for each of the 12 signs, available together or individually.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Now is the time to be working with setting or altering patterns in your life. Astrologically this is a function of how eclipses are events that help us set patterns or alter the flow of continuity. They can be used consciously for this purpose, or this vital function they serve can go on unconsciously. Simply put, it’s a more meaningful time than usual to make conscious choices, because it’s like they exist in a kind of multiplier. At the time of eclipses, we might say we’re making meta-decisions. These are decisions that (using approximate words again) shape destiny. They do so by having effects on, or drawing intention from, a level closer to the core of causation itself.

If you cannot actually make changes (and I believe we can always make small changes, if not big ones), use this time to set your intentions; to direct your life in a conscious way; to state what you want; to state clearly who you are. (I am reminded of one of my favorite-ever fortune cookies that said, “Be resolutely who you are. Be humbly who you aspire to be.)

With Venus and Mars in Gemini, and the recent Sun/Mercury/Eris setup (which also involved two different versions of Lilith, the asteroid and the Black Moon, currently still in aspect), there might be some odd interference on the radar. I’ve mentioned Mars in Gemini a few times, which emphasizes the ‘divisive’ or ‘split’ (properly, dualistic) nature of Gemini perhaps more than any other factor. Venus, for her part, has just completed an aspect that I neglected to mention: an opposition to Pholus in Sagittarius, still within one degree. I could say a lot about Pholus; Mars is about to oppose it so maybe it’s a good topic to stay on for a while, since that opposition will being both into high expression. The key phrase that works well is, “small cause, big effect.” [Tracy adds: Just like astrology itself.]

It is, to put it minimally, a destabilizing influence, though one that releases pressure, brings things to a head, and connects us to the past, as it gets results now. Structurally, Pholus draws on generational history; compare this with Nessus, which takes place within a limited (though not necessarily defined) timeframe and which brings results back to their point of origin in a circular style. Pholus to Venus will evoke the question of how any one woman’s identity is drawn from a line of grandmothers. For a man it will describe the image of women that has been passed down to him through the generations, as well as the sense of his own inner woman as inherited from the past.

[I just got off the phone with a reader who explained this to me in her own words, though without having read this particular diary. From her observation, she sees many contemporary women trying to make men pay for the suffering of their mothers and grandmothers.]

Venus and Mars in Gemini are reminding us that there are a lot of ways to turn the crystal of gender. Plenty else reminds us that we tend to exist within gender prisons, where our roles, behavior, values, language, desire nature and on and on, are all supposedly pre-dictated for us.

This eclipse involves more than gender. There is a lot about our parents having gone missing in ways that we don’t see, who are unavailable, or whose damage to us is insidious and unacknowledged — more on that another time.

Yours & truly,