Hang Loose: Standoffish New Moon in Scorpio

Dear Friend and Reader:

Scorpio is the sign of hormonal desire and the drive to connect, to merge and to create life. Monday, the Moon and the Sun align in the dark and mysterious 8th sign for the annual New Moon here. This event would be quite enough on its own to draw up the waters from inside the cave systems deep beneath awareness.

Yet the New Moon is also joined by Mars and Ceres, which are infusing the nearly unstoppable emotional prowess of the sign of the Scorpion (who never changes his nature). It is my assessment that the whole concept of Scorpio, with its associations of sex and death, is much of what makes people nervous about astrology in total. It is the sign of all taboos; of all that you cannot mention at the holiday dinner table.

When we consider that Scorpio is a fixed water sign, one might think: how do you ‘fix’ (set, or hold still) the substance that can penetrate everything? How does one make permanent the very element that is never so? How does one fasten the unfastenable?

Examples of ‘fixed water’ might include fossilized seawater, permafrost, or an iceberg so massive nothing can survive colliding with it. If you can think of other examples from nature, I am curious what they are. (A glacier is more of an active process; I would associate them with cardinal earthy sign Capricorn.)

A Massive Collection of Minor Planets in Scorpio

I work with a slowly expanding but generally stable set of minor planets, and check the list for just about every chart I cast. Some orbit very slowly, with Sedna (for example) taking 11,400 years to complete one solar cycle; some (such as asteroids) orbit quickly, taking as little as three or four years to complete a cycle.

These objects tend to bunch up in several places rather than be distributed evenly. Though I cannot delineate them all in one article, the current grouping in the 30-degree range known as Scorpio (in order through the sign) includes Haumea, Elatus, Isis, Persephone, Apollon, Lilith, Rhadamanthus, Narcissus, Zhulong, Mbabamwanawaresa, Poseidon, Child, Hopi, Typhon, Ceres, Dziewanna, Hidalgo, Osiris, Deucalion, and Ceto.

This may give you a sense of the sheer volume of both energy and symbolic referencing that will be activated by the new Moon.

Every day, the Earth-Sun system makes contact with one or more of these objects. Then when the Moon enters Scorpio on Saturday at 1:39 pm EST, it will make conjunctions to all of them in the space of about 60 hours. Mars and the Sun are present, creating much personal emphasis: making it real through physical sensation.

The Sign of Deep Feeling

Scorpio is the sign of deep feeling — the human quality is being driven out of existence by everything around us being reduced to zeros and ones — and slowly infiltrating our inner reality.

It seems that even experiencing, much less admitting, to the need to connect with others physically, through the watery realm, is an awkward experience.

To “have feelings” in our time is to feel alone. It’s lonely enough to feel strongly about anyone or anything. Yet in our moment of history, there is the question of not just whether anyone else will resonate, but the question of whether they can.

Among the appalling lack of simple generosity we experience today is the reticence to admit feeling, relating and empathizing in physically present form. It is easy on the internet; it seems threatening in person, as if for many people the commitment is too great.

But like water and rust, emotions never sleep, feelings are always in motion, and eventually we notice. Eventually they get our attention.

Uranus in Taurus: The Body Electrified

When Uranus entered Taurus in 2018, I remember working with a few of my colleagues here at Planet Waves to come up with metaphors for what this might be; the idea of “the body electric” from Walt Whitman came up. He wrote in Leaves of Grass, originally published in 1855:

It is fair to say that Whitman (himself a polymath Gemini — nurse, editor, journalist, printer, sexual pioneer and honorary poet laureate of the United States) was well ahead of his time; in 1855 the only electrical device outside of a lab was the telegraph (invented in 1832 and first used in 1844). Even in a book named after leaves, he is describing the soul itself as an electrical instrument. We might say this was the moment when modern poetry was born.

The “electric” connection to Uranus involves its inventive and industrial nature. It has a “bolt from the blue” quality. It’s prominent in the charts of what we consider the great inventions (the light bulb and the airplane among them) and its discovery in 1781 harkened the industrial and electrical revolutions — and revolutions generally.

Now the electrification of the body is literal. This includes the many artificial electric fields by which we are surrounded all the time, the EMF off-gassing of the entire electrical grid, chip implants, cochlear implants, bionic technology and the robots we interact with all day. Then there are the physical robots that are coming — the invasion fo the androids looms around every corner.

We might include the claim of “graphene,” said to be an injectable electrical technology (however, I recently published a scientific paper challenging its existence).

Uranus is also implicated in revolutions of all kinds; in days of yore, at times when Uranus was prominent in the sky, the revolts would spread faster than the mail could bring word of them. Through the 1960s, Uranus was one of the most prominent and active planetary archetypes (Chiron opposite Uranus; Saturn opposite Uranus; Uranus conjunct Pluto).

A Word from Neptune about the Virtual Universe

It’s noteworthy that Neptune, the planet of illusion, was discovered just two years after the telegraph was publicly introduced. All electrical communication technology descending from the telegraph, which, like today’s computing devices, uses binary code.

Much of what we live with today is a vast world of illusion created by binary, electrical technologies. This includes the whole universe of virtual and enhanced realities, artificial intelligence and deep fakes, and this is what lurks behind the out-of-control insanity and spiritual instability of our times.

I can never remind people enough of this core idea from the teachings of Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall:

This describes perfectly what we are experiencing today.

Uranus in the New Moon Chart

Let’s return to this chart that has 24 objects in Scorpio. The New Moon and Mars stand exactly opposite Uranus in Taurus. Many of these points are also opposite Jupiter, though Jupiter I think is on another mission. Still, it provides mass, weight and gravitas to somewhat balance the Scorpio influence. And Jupiter in Taurus emphasizes the wisdom of the body.

It is as if the body’s hormones and natural sexual and reproductive drives, represented by Scorpio — which should infuse all of experience, all people and all of society to some degree — are standing up to the “electrified body” (which means disembodied consciousness) of Uranus in Taurus.

Remember, you can still be disembodied no matter how perfect your downward-facing dog is. This is about sanity, not the perfection of the body itself.

One other thing: There is an event brewing in Taurus. That happens April 20, 2024 — the one-time conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. This is a revolutionary event in its own right, and developments around the time of the New Moon chart hint at what it might be about.

There is a lot of energy in this chart, set on a time-release due to the retrogrades of Jupiter and Uranus, and because their conjunction is still about six months away.

Lots of surprises are in store, for this New Moon and the big 4/20 in the sky.

With love,

Here is an inventory of everything in Scorpio at this moment; for the New Moon move everything up a little and add the Moon.