Eclipse of the Sun Monday, Asian Year of Ox Begins

We are in an eclipse moment. The first of two, an annular solar eclipse, occurs overnight Sunday to Monday at 6+ Aquarius. [Here is NASA’s official page on the eclipse.] This is Tet, the Asian New Year. Tet is held on the first New Moon after the first Full Moon after the winter solstice. This year it happens to be a solar eclipse that brings in the Year of the Ox. The qualities of Ox are diligence, tolerance and persistence. It is a stoic sign, whose natives are known for speaking little but showing quiet strength.

The approximately equivalent Western sign is Capricorn, a cardinal earth sign. This is interesting because Capricorn is now such an important focus of Western astrology, as Pluto has taken up residence here.

Wikipedia’s page on the Ox year relates the traditional wisdom that it’s “the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. This powerful sign is a born leader, being quite dependable and possessing an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm and modest. Like their animal namesake, the Ox is unswervingly patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint.” Like Capricorn, there can be a quality of mischief and devilishness at the center of Ox stoicism, though it does not emerge easily or often; natives of this sign like to maintain the appearance of propriety and are easily embarrassed if seen to be childish. But most of what they experience as different or unconventional occurs within the interior of their lives.

A Chinese year repeats every 12 years. Each Chinese year is associated with a color or element, which move in a 60-year cycle. We are now entering the year of the earth Ox, and the last time that happened was 60 years ago, in 1949.

Agence France-Presse interviewed a number of feng shui masters on the energetic quality of the year, who were strikingly pessimistic. They seemed to agree that the Ox year, dominated by the element Earth, was missing the element Fire that was key to financial growth — and that this element would have to be provided by those working for success themselves.

In Western astrology, that fire looks like the innovation and inventive quality of Aquarius, and the imaginative power of Pisces, two locations of the zodiac where so much energy is focused right now. But the presence of Saturn in Virgo through next November has the feeling of over-abundance of earth.

To me the alignment of the Ox year, the eclipse and Pluto in Capricorn suggest that now for a change many more people will need to work for their living rather than cash in. The Pluto in Sagittarius time — expansion, expansion, expansion, mostly fueled by credit — was a time when resources and labor became disconnected. In effect, we were paid in credit points that we then had to pay back double or triple. So it really was not an expansion at all; it was a kind of gap opening up. Ox represents doing the work necessary to shore up the structure.

In Western astrology, the degree of the solar eclipse has a fun Sabian symbol — a child being born out of an egg. Humanist/composer/astrologer Dane Rudhyar describes this as “the emergence of new mutations according to the great rhythm of the cosmos.”

Apparently, evolution occurs faster than the kind of endless, gradual incremental slide that we think of it as. New forms of life, inluding physical forms, are born into existence at surprising moments.

The eclipse is conjunct Jupiter in Aquarius, which offers projection and suggests that our moment is about a radical change in public attitude, values and mental patterns. With Mercury conjunct Mars in Capricorn, this may be occurring more quickly than we’re expecting.

As I have mentioned a few times, this eclipse is reminiscent of an event in February 1962, nearly 47 years ago, which seems to have had an influence in sparking off the 1960s. Both charts have something else in common, which is being close in the approach to a major Uranus-Pluto alignment. This long cycle, which repeats about every 121 years and has four major turning points, is now at one of its hot spots. It also was in 1962, and by some coincidence when The New York Times was founded in 1851 (please see story below for details).

We are now in that moment right before the revolution, though there are many sensitive types, and those open to the energy, for whom it is happening at what feels like full strength right now. But behold, the pace accelerates as these days, seasons and years unfold.

Eclipses are pattern setting times; which means they are the times we can let go of old modes of existence and establish the new ones that we want to live by. With so much emphasis on Aquarius, this includes our modes of relating to groups, the conditioning patterns of our friends, our sense of community and expanding our need — it is a need — to participate in the world in a meaningful way.

An old fog is lifting: you could call it the fog of group self-delusion. Consensus reality is changing, but that can only be the result of a the consensus itself changing. There is a place for you as this happens; there are people for you; there is a time for every purpose, including awakening.