Practical Transition

By Len Wallick

Tomorrow, just before 6:30 am EDT, Luna completes her conjunction with old Sol in mid-Virgo, exacting the New Moon. Less than 24 hours after that, Venus moves into Scorpio where it will station retrograde next month. This coming Friday, retrograde Jupiter will return to Pisces until next year to make up for lost time. Finally, Mercury will station forward this coming Sunday.

That is a lot of transition coming up. Even as the cardinal T-square is in the midst of one of its own, as reviewed in yesterday’s blog. The seasons as well are about to change with the autumnal equinox in about two weeks. But what about today? After all, this blog is called Daily Astrology. Indeed, as the Moon is in the process of applying towards its solar conjunction, there are some things worth looking at. One thing to note, Virgo’s retrograde ruling planet seems to pop up over and over again, no matter where we look.

First of all, Mercury gets real with the Moon today. Yesterday, as you may recall, Old Wing Foot formed meaningful aspects with the Capricorn lunar node and the mean lunar apogee in Pisces. Both the mean node and the mean apogee are abstract, hypothetical objects with location but not mass. In both cases, the location is determined by a sort of averaging process that finds the middle ground of Luna’s wobbly path, so the word “mean” is not to be confused as some sort of malefic. Both points represent a place where the Moon has been, will be or would be if it was there.

Talk about abstract. Did we say imaginary? It’s like getting married to a gaming avatar, conducting an entire courtship on-line or leaving your estate to a pet. Wait, those things have really happened.

Maybe that’s the point today as Mercury backs into a sho’ `nuff conjunction with the Moon ten hours after Luna ingresses Virgo. The clear and open channel between the emotions and their verbal expression are tempered by an admonition to be real. One would not be surprised to see a material emergence of what started off as an intuition last Thursday or Friday. At the very least, you could say the path of least resistance right now is the practical one.

That’s the thing about Virgo. It’s a mutable earth sign with Mercury as its ruling planet. Virgo is open to ideas, adaptable but always and finally practical. The fact that it is a sign associated with health issues and concerns demonstrates this predilection. After all, what good is wealth, power and potential if you don’t have your health? This factor is crucial. It is what stabilizes the dynamic that has materialized over the last week or so.

It would not be surprising to see the momentum of the Luna-Mercury conjunction carry over to tomorrow’s New Moon but it takes two to tango. The Sun has an aspect of its own today that will almost certainly carry over as well.

You see, the Sun today is in a spot that retrograde Mercury warmed up late last month. This spot is just before mid-Virgo, and is in a precise and tense geometric relationship with the conjunction of two mysterious objects in Sagittarius: the Great Attractor and Ixion, an object in the outer solar system named after a mythological figure. We touched on Ixion when it was Mercury’s turn to be tense with it, saying we would come back for further examination at an appropriate time. That time is now.

In a long ago maybe-it-happened-maybe-it-didn’t time, there was a tribe of humans called Lapiths. Physically, they were like super-humans, able to fight and win against their contemporaries the centaurs. For some of them, the spiritual and moral development lagged behind the physical. Ixion was one such case. A king among Lapiths, Ixion let the entitlement of his position get out of hand. He murdered his father-in-law rather than pay a dowry debt. When Jupiter/Zeus took pity on him, Ixion was neither repentant nor grateful. Ixion had the gall to hit on Jupiter’s wife. In short, this dude was bad news; a perfect example of how power can serve to corrupt.

Astronomically, Ixion is far out, literally. It is one of those objects that orbits out past Neptune. The rate of its apparent motion is very close to that of Pluto and in systems classifying orbital characteristics, it is lumped together with Pluto. Think of it as a wannabe Pluto and you will bridge both mythology and astronomy to arrive at the astrology.

For quite a while now, Ixion has been conjunct the Great Attractor in mid-Sagittarius. To reiterate, there are two main things that distinguish the Great Attractor. First, we have no idea what the heck it is and no way of telling for the foreseeable future. Second, it is a location, a direction towards which millions of galaxies (including our own) are headed.

In a way, the Great Attractor has something in common with the mean lunar node and apogee because location is such a large part of its identity. On the other hand it could not be more different in terms of its palpable influence over large amounts of mass. This dichotomy, paired with Ixion’s duplicity, makes for a complex, troubling conjunction. This conjunction is long-lasting, and like all slow-moving astrological objects, is contributing to the tenor of our time.

Today’s tense geometrical relationship between the Sun in Virgo and Ixion in Sagittarius is called a square. Astrologically, this aspect is an internal tension that can be resolved by action. There’s the rub. How can the symbol of the conscious self and its expression take action to resolve the unknowable, polarizing and untrustworthy within itself?

As with the Moon-Mercury complex, the key may very well be the contributing influence of the Sun in Virgo. Be practical. Don’t get overwhelmed by what you don’t or can’t know. Stick with what you do know. Don’t give trust away, even to yourself. Earn it by looking after yourself, especially your health.

So those are the two components carried by the participants to tomorrow’s New Moon. We have a layered and developed relationship between the Moon’s emotional intuition and its spontaneous, communicative expression and the Sun’s conflicts and uncertainty about our expressed identity. Both luminaries are informed by retrograde Mercury’s once and future experience, with access to the grounding practicality of Virgo’s care, custody and control.

And that’s some of what makes today’s astrology connect with tomorrow, when the New Moon will unite the two luminaries into full expression of Virgo, the sign where their conjunction takes place. We may experience that conjunction best by adaptable, practical responses to the series of transitions to follow.

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