New Moon in Virgo: We Can See Clearly Now

I don’t know about the rest of you, but last week was particularly challenging for me and all of us on the West Coast. Fires were ravaging our forests, consuming whole towns and displacing over half a million people. The whole central valley in Oregon has been scorched to the point that the soil itself has died. It could be decades before our trees grow back, if ever. Our climate crisis has given us a preview of what is to come for our whole planet if we do not reverse course.

The coast itself was engulfed in choking smoke. In my little town, the visibility was 0.00 and the air quality “hazardous.” All of us were shut up behind closed doors and windows, forced even deeper into seclusion to confront our fears. Everyone I spoke with was going through an inner hell. Specters from the past were arising, issues we have wrestled with our whole lives. People were feeling helpless, hopeless, impotent, despairing.

At the same time, more of Trump’s dirty secrets were coming to light – his contempt for the military families that serve our nation, his countless lies about the pandemic, his suppression of intelligence about Russia’s interference with our upcoming election, his fear-mongering to his base. The cold war between political parties is on the verge of conflagration with Roger Stone encouraging Trump to declare martial law and seize power if Biden wins the election. The assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, formerly Trump’s chauffeur, is encouraging people to purchase large stores of ammunition.

On top of this, an ICE whistleblower has revealed the literally horrific treatment of captive immigrants. A Mengele-type doctor is sterilizing incarcerated women, performing unwanted and unnecessary hysterectomies. (For those of you who don’t recognize this reference, Joseph Mengele was a Nazi doctor who performed horrendous experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp.) The “Uterus Collector,” as he has been called, is operating in the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia which has become an experimental concentration camp. There are further whistleblower reports about sexual abuse of detained immigrant women and children around our country. Our nation has joined the Evil Empire, the Dark Side.

Furthermore, I read about the “shadow pandemic” that is taking place in Peru, and undoubtedly around the world: domestic abuse and “femicide.” Almost 1500 Women in Peru have disappeared; others beaten, abused and murdered by men unable to cope with their loss of jobs and their forced confinement.

The Full Moon in Pisces on September 1^st brought our suffering to light. The Age of Pisces is winding down and if we look back over the last 2500 years we see our world ravaged by wars, plagues and inhumanity to man. Like the Passion of Christ, we as humanity have been suffering on the Cross of Matter. Right now, this year, these next three months, we can begin to liberate ourselves. It depends heavily on the choice we make in the November election.

We are not just voting for a person, or a party, we are voting for a future – whether or not we will even have one! We are in a life and death battle between the forces of good and evil and if you don’t believe that, take a good look at what is happening right now in our country. Our president isn’t satisfied with all the power he has already usurped. He wants to be like Putin, and all the other authoritarian leaders of oppressed nations. I’ve been warning for 18 months that our precious Democracy is in jeopardy. We need to take it seriously NOW.

THE NEW MOON IN VIRGO

Thursday September 17^th is the New Moon at 25 degrees of Virgo. The theme for the coming month is discrimination, the ultimate gift of Virgo. Mercury rules this sign and asks us first of all to see clearly. While Mercury is our thinking and communication function, it is foremost our perceiving capability, not with a cursory glance, but with a deep look, a lengthy consideration, an analysis of all the information that allows us to reach conclusions. In Virgo that means seeing what isn’t working, what needs to change, to improve. This is Virgo functioning optimally and the coming 30 days, until the next new moon, are about clearing out the cobwebs in our minds and making rational decisions about our future.

There are so many aspects, but I will focus on what I consider the most important. The Sun and Moon are square the Moon’s nodes. You recall that where the Moon intersects the ecliptic heading either North or South in its oblique orbit around the Earth, it forms pockets of energy, points in space that are highly charged. The South Node is considered to be our past – both personal and collective. The North Node is the direction in which we are evolving our consciousness. The North Node is in Gemini right now bringing us new information, enhancing our 2020 vision, tickling our curiosity, opening our minds. These nodes are trying to prepare us for the upcoming transition in Aquarius and to have a successful 2600 future-years, we need to wake up, see the truth, process new information and be willing to change.

The nodes are in mutable signs. The energy of Mutable signs is letting go, slipping into the flow. Cardinal signs initiate, Fixed signs stabilize, Mutable signs help us let go of what we have stabilized and flow into something new. Life is a process. The Universe is a process. We go through these cycles, seeing a little more clearly each revolution. That North Node in Gemini is attempting to refresh our minds.

The South Node is in Sagittarius. I’ve written several times about the centaur archer whose task is to integrate horse and man, body and Spirit. This man-horse has aspirations. He aims his arrow at the future, the North Node, dreaming big things, imagining wonders, envisioning a world of freedom and good will. So what do we have to do to create that world? Expand our minds and clear out the clutter of the past.

Perhaps those dreams you’ve been clinging to aren’t what you want any more. Now that you have more information, that you see all the problems and challenges ahead, you may have a new dream forming. It’s okay to let go of the old dream. It served you well to guide you this far. Our allegiance is to the future now and to the generations that follow.

Not all of our past is bad. We have been learning for hundreds of thousands of years about manifested life and its potential. We have developed skills, learned from our experience, gained wisdom. Forgotten gifts may be sitting on a dusty shelf in the subconscious. It’s not all horrors in there.

So let’s take a deeper look at Virgo. She is the Virgin in the sense that she is innocent. As an archetype she is an open playing field of refinement. She is the process by which we gain wisdom, and we do that by sifting through the sands of our personal time. I have emphasized this for months. It may sound like a drag. Maybe you even feel that I have been nagging you. Forgive me if that tone entered my writing. It is my deepest desire to help you triumph through this evolutionary passage. I pass on to you what I am learning from my experience and what I am seeing in the reflection of human consciousness projected onto the heavenly dome.

Perhaps you haven’t felt that way at all. Which brings me to a typical Virgo issue that surfaced for me, and perhaps for you as well. Last week, enveloped in smoke and fog so thick I couldn’t see the outside world, I grew more anxious, not in my mind so much as in my body. I had little shots of pain zinging randomly through my limbs and torso. My stomach clenched and I couldn’t eat. When I did, I felt sick, the kind of sick in which you want to throw up your whole life.

It started with an innocent experience of meeting some people online for the first time. We had a great talk and a lot of fun sharing, but when it was over I suddenly had a vicious attack from within. It’s a long story – a week long – so I won’t go into details, but I discovered the workings of the Superego. I was conceptually aware of this part of our psyche, but I had never experienced its ferocity. At first it knocked me flat. I cowered, I retreated, I felt every awful feeling that I had ever felt, plus some new ones that puzzled me. I had plunged into a hellish reality and at first I was believing it.

The Superego is that part of our psyche that stands guard over our conditioning. Every little taboo, from babyhood on, is stored in there and when we step out of bounds, it starts whispering to us – “That was dumb. You shouldn’t have said that. They must think you’re a fool,” etc. You know the voice. It’s a little different for all of us, based on the “no-no’s” we learned from an early age.

We each have a Core Law that we are absolutely not allowed to break. It is represented by the planet Pluto and as you know, Pluto is hard at work breaking all the rules. And for us to meet the challenge of our broken system, we have to break some rules ourselves. I don’t mean break the law, I mean overcoming our conditioning. My Core Law is “Do Not Become Visible.” I’ve been breaking it for a year and a half now, and if I hadn’t broken that rule I wouldn’t be writing these words. This is my contribution.  I could not let a childhood taboo stop me. But ever since I stepped out of bounds, I’ve been plagued by the inner critic.

We each came here with a mission. We each have a contribution to make, a gift of our talent and wisdom. It’s time to step out of our shadow selves, the dwarf beings we think we are, and step into our authenticity, our authority, our power. And this is another function Pluto performs – empowerment. We need every ounce of our spiritual power, right now. To get that power, we have to break that Core Rule that keeps us small. We have to step into leadership. We have to offer our talents and our gifts, our vision and hope, our love and commitment to co-creating a beautiful future.

If that sounds like too big a task, take a look at what is holding you back. This Virgo month is providing us with the context in which to analyze all the information coming at us from without and surfacing from within. To help us further, the New Moon is opposite Neptune the great dissolver of boundaries. This is the month to let go – let go of the past, let go of our self-image, let go of our timidity, let go of all the past information that is standing between us and the one we all came here to be.

This New Moon forms a Grand Cross: Sun and Moon oppose Neptune and square the Nodes, the axis of evolution. We can shift this Cross of Suffering into a Cross of Empowerment. Everything we need is right here and now.

As if all that weren’t enough, the New Moon is trine Saturn retrograde in Capricorn. Check out your issues with authority, inner and outer. Check out your integrity – how whole are you? What parts of you have been abandoned or compromised? Saturn will help keep us grounded while we are crossing boundaries into the unknown. Saturn will reinforce our growth, help us take more and more responsibility for ourselves and our lives.

I hope you are beginning to feel excited. I hear it everywhere. Yes we are suffering but we are also feeling the future tugging at us. It’s an almost giddy feeling.

I’m still on vacation for another week to be with my daughter who is coming to visit. I will check in on the Equinox, more energy to help us regain our balance. Be your own best friend right now. Virgo discrimination can turn into criticism and judgment. When the Superego tries to diminish you, don’t believe it.

By the way, my phone which has eerily become my oracle, suddenly presented me with a free book last week on Audible. It’s called Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within. It’s fabulous. The author, Bryan Brown, is a student of A.H. Almaas. He is deeply rooted in spiritual evolution and knows how to work with the Superego. I’ll share insights as I learn, but you might want to listen to it yourself. I believe the Superego is the integrated paradigm of our collective consciousness, along with all its myths, its laws and its gods. The entire psychic history of humanity is wrapped up in there. We still carry what we perceived as Original Sin. It goes that deep.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Venus in Leo square to Uranus in Taurus, one of the signs she rules. On a mundane level, take responsibility for your finances. Uranus brings us surprises. On an emotional level, tend to your relationships. On a spiritual level, be willing to receive the deep love of the Goddess. Let her fill your heart with compassion and unconditional love, then ground that love in your reality.

A final note – Jupiter turned direct on September 13^th. This archetype helps us keep the faith. He supports our healing, our integrating, our optimism, our wildest, most beautiful dreams. We cannot give up now. We’re so close.