Pisces Full Moon, Conjunct Nessus

Posted on Aug. 31, 2020 | Link to original

Dear Friend and Reader:

Overnight Tuesday to Wednesday, the Moon reaches full phase in Pisces. The aspect peaks on Sept. 2, at 1:22 am EDT, which will make for an interesting night of dreaming if anyone can get to sleep.

We finally have an aspect that harmonizes with the rest of the sky rather than bangs into it: the earthy Sun and watery Moon go well with all the activity in the Earth and Fire signs, and sidestep Mars and Eris — though we will be hearing from them again soon enough.

In the background of everything is Mars getting ready to station retrograde on Sept. 9. That is going to stir the pot because the retrograde involves a long conjunction to chaos goddess Eris, as well as squares to everyone in the smoke-filled room of Pallas, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn. That discussion I will save for the monthly edition, which comes out in a day or two.

Pisces Moon Conjunct Nessus

The Full Moon is distinctive for being conjunct Nessus, the third centaur (discovered 1993). All the centaurs address matters of healing and wholeness. Each does so in a different style. Chiron (discovered 1977) is the crystal with many facets.

Nessus pertains to some of the darker elements of human nature, and their tendency to abuse trust, and for the injuries inflicted by this abuse to repeat themselves as we go through life. The focal point of Nessus was described most astutely by Melanie Reinhart, who said its core concept is “the buck stops here.”

That phrase pertains to the buckhorn used in poker. When the buck arrives with you, it’s your turn to deal. You can also “pass the buck” and let someone else deal. The visual of passing an object around and around the table illustrates the cycles of karma that Nessus represents, including the cycles of abuse.

In Western society, particularly American, we do a lot of passing the buck: that is, a lot of not dealing. Whether in civic life or personal, the tendency in our culture is to kick the can down the road, rather than address our problems.

As one of my clients put it recently, American society never really wants to solve a problem; rather, they want to perpetually manage it, and then turn it into an industry. In personal life, the industry would be the state of perpetual distraction that unresolved problems cause. This, in turn, has a way of preventing people from being where they say they want to be, and doing what they say they want to do.

In Gestalt therapy, the use of problems is considered carefully: often they are kept around as devices to ensure limitations. This includes abusive situations.

The Role of Guilt and Shame

The spectrum of emotions in the guilt/shame genre is a Nessus related topic. This is more about the intentional use of these emotions to gain control over people, and also includes the residue that this kind of treatment leaves in us. That residue is called guilt, which right below the surface is a form of angry resentment.

Nearly all the time, guilt and shame are social control devices. They are used first by the family of origin to get control over seemingly unruly children. This is mostly a matter of convenience. This technique then expands into commonplace and often unacknowledged use in civil society, where people try to get control over one another by shaming them.

The interesting thing is that it always seems at the time as if the person or group getting shamed deserves some ruthless treatment. Then later on, it usually works out that they didn’t really deserve it, though this hardly matters the next time there is someone who seems to deserve being tarred and feathered.

Nessus represents a call-out to see this pattern for what it is, and to stop the cycle of abuse. As with all things Nessus, that can only begin with you, right now. It’s not something to put off for the future, or to delegate to someone else.

Industrial Scale Victimization

Guilt and shame hold together the world as we know it. These emotions bind people to their pain, and have a way of making courage seem like a stupid idea, so why bother trying. Any honest path to healing will address guilt and shame as primary problems that obstruct the awareness of love, and prevent people from living happily. We don’t need a workshop to learn this; we merely need to see what life is like without shaming ourselves or one another.

One of the most predominant themes of both private and public life is victimization, and claiming one’s right to be a victim. Our society makes a lot of victims, and is showing no sign of stopping. Yet it does little to actually help the people who are damaged by its policies and ways of life.

And in this context, one can usually get a lot of mileage out of claiming to be a victim. We see this all the time, though it’s not permissible to say something even when you know someone is faking it.

Then you can be accused of victim shaming, and subjected to shame yourself. Being a victim is actually a safe place from the standpoint of status in society, though spiritually and emotionally it’s a dangerous place because it’s not possible to be loving, creative or happy when one is in victim mode.

Moon Sextile to Uranus and Albion

There is a better way. If we look to the chart as an illustration, the Moon makes a glorious aspect to Uranus in Taurus. Uranus is the one who breaks consensus, who speaks up, who stirs the pot. This is less in the orderly fashion of Chiron, and more in the rebellious style of Prometheus.

Uranus in Taurus is saying feel the beauty and sensitivity of your body (sensations for which guilt and shame are armor). I think of Uranus in Taurus as the body electric. Allow that energy to flow freely through your biopsychic system; through you. Allow yourself to be curious about nature and biology. Give yourself a break from your viewpoint.

Uranus is conjunct Albion, the new name for 1992 QB1, the first planet ever discovered beyond Pluto. Before there was Eris, and back when the Kuiper Belt was just a theory, there was 1992 QB1. It was discovered in the first degree of Aries — the Aries Point, the intersection of the individual and the collective.

This conjunction is calling for a revolution: of the right to feel, to heal, to be, and to express one’s pleasure in any way that is harmonious with one’s intimate partners. To heal guilt, shame and embarrassment, and to find the incredible well of energy behind it, it’s necessary to go right to the edge — and often, to enter the emotions rather than avoiding them.

This is truly an act of defiance, in more ways than are obvious. The Moon is burning bright the next few days, illuminating your intuition, your innervision, and your courage.

With love,