It’s a New Moon in Libra tomorrow morning at about 7:09 am EDT. Every New Moon is a conjunction of the luminaries, Moon and Sun. A conjunction is two or more objects in the same degree of the same sign. Every New Moon is also the start of a lunation, the period from one luminary conjunction to the next. The beginning of a lunation is for Moon what a new season is for Sun, forming the template of a paradigm that will be developed and carried through until the cycle is completed and another commences. It would not be surprising if new patterns were rapidly emerging in your own life about now. It would be entirely consistent with the sky if those themes were aptly described or readily explained as paradoxical.
A paradox is a contradiction that conceals, or reveals, a truth. We have that going on symbolically in Libra right now. Tomorrow’s New Moon will emphasize, amplify and be a part of it. Most obviously, the apparent contradiction is with the concept of balance.
In last Friday’s edition of Daily Astrology, Eric Francis characterized an important dimension of Libra as “the expression of beauty through balance.” That phrase succinctly captures the essence of the one and only cardinal air sign. Most fundamentally, Libra’s glyph is uniquely an inanimate object, a set of balance beam scales. Those scales are an ancient and practical tool with an aesthetic appeal, representing an ideal of indifference. The sheer number of visible objects in Libra right now would seem to belie that ideal.
In addition to the luminaries, the planets commonly accepted as visible to the unaided eye are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These seven wandering lights are the traditional sign rulers and have been a part of human consciousness for uncounted thousands of years. They are the core of astrology. As of tomorrow, five of them will be concentrated into one twelfth of the zodiac, a thin slice of sky we call Libra. That is an intrinsically unbalanced arrangement called a stellium.