The Aries New Moon — conjunct Eris, Venus and Mars

Genevieve writes a horoscope designed for your Moon sign for Planet Waves called Moonshine. We run them twice per month, for each Full and New Moon. You can read them as part of the Planet Waves premium service that features Eric’s horoscopes and astrology articles. — Amanda

By Genevieve Hathaway

On Wednesday, the Aries New Moon takes place at 5:35 am EDT, conjunct Mars, Venus and Eris — bringing us a picture of the very personal internal sense of chaos we experience when our views on relationship and relating clash with our parents’ views. As we work through this high-energy alignment kicking off spring (or fall for folks in the Southern Hemisphere), we move through an opportunity to gain a new understanding of what it takes to balance our personal needs in relationships while meeting the needs of others.

This New Moon takes place with the Sun and Moon in Aries. New Moons are fertile moments or openings to begin new projects, endeavours, attitudes and relationships. In Aries, there is plenty of personal drive available for initiating and starting something new. With intense Mars, Venus and Eris all in alignment with the New Moon, we get an image of attaching jet packs to whatever we’re trying to start — there’s a lot of power and thrust behind new projects, ideas and relationships.

The challenge is to harness that energy so it moves in the direction we intend rather than as an unguided missile.

Mars is about wants and desires; located in Aries, it is effective in translating these desires into actions. Venus, even though considered in detriment in Aries, is also good at going after what it wants in this sign. But with so much driven, aggressive energy at our disposal, we are also being cautioned to move with tact and thought for all involved. We must be vigilant against stream-rolling anyone and anything in our path.

Mars and Venus are also about relationships, as are the Sun and Moon. The Sun and Moon in tight conjunction give us a picture of our parents and our parents’ parents’ types of relationships. Mars conjunct Venus only a couple degrees away gives another picture of a different type of relationship: one with greater focus on supporting the individual.

Eris sits between these two conjunctions, a sort of imaginary line representing a fragmentation or split between an older generational attitude toward relationships and the contemporary question we face of reinventing what a relationship is. As Eric has written on Planet Waves, “Eris flips the ‘I am’ of Aries around to a question of ‘who am I’,” changing what was a statement of fact to a question surrounding self-identity.

In the context of this New Moon, we are being asked to re-evaluate how our relationships are serving or not serving us in investigating this question of who we are. Another question is how to restructure them to better support us as individuals.

One more key minor planet is involved in the New Moon: Pholus in Sagittarius, making a trine to the conjunction in Aries. Trines are alignments that are easy to access or use — it’s easy to tap into the energy without being conscious of it. This means that what is happening in Aries and Sagittarius will be working in a way that might make it hard to see where one process stops and the other comes in.

Whereas Aries comes with the keywords of ‘I am’, as Isabel Hickey states in Astrology: A Cosmic Science, Sagittarius gets the phrase ‘I perceive’. She continues to explain that Sagittarius “governs understanding and the superconscious mind.” Pholus in Sagittarius applies an altered perception to situations. It is associated with small causes having big effects, things moving more rapidly than we think, and runaway reactions.

Pholus is giving us the ability to make rapid changes, yet with so much high-voltage, fast moving energy involved with these planets and signs it could be easy for the whole situation get away from us or have a larger impact than we wished.

The caution of this New Moon is about moving too quickly to control a situation. Even when all the energy is pushing to go, go, go, we are being advised to resist the pull and instead make plans, double check those plans, and proceed methodically — continually reassessing our trajectory.

As we move with intention and thoughtful re-examination of our relationships and how they support us as individuals, remember that we’re not the only ones involved in these relationships. Our partners are working through the same process as well. Offering grace and empathy to all involved will actually get us further along, and we will discover a greater depth of intimacy in the process.

Genevieve Hathaway is an astrologer, Planet Waves contributor and photojournalist. Genevieve is available for astrology readings. You can contact her at genevieve@venusinblue.com.