New Moon in Virgo: Humility and Power

The New Moon in Virgo arrives with the sun tomorrow at 6:37 am EDT.

She slips in on the skirts of rosy-fingered dawn to clear away last night’s mess, prepare a healthy breakfast, and wake us with the soft sound of a singing bowl. What could be more Virgo than that?

This is a very Virgo New Moon. All the inner planets, those connected to our core character, sit together in this sign of mutable, flexible Earth: The Sun and Moon at 6 Virgo are conjunct Mercury at 2, Mars at 7, and Venus at 11.

Heart, body, mind, values, and action all align with a focus on practical service. Virgoans tend to be great organizers and planners, and find their greatest contentment in the doing. The zen saying, chop wood, carry water, was likely coined by a Virgo.

In today’s world of “big picture” thinking and grand gestures, Virgo is derided for being too fussy, too narrow, too interested in the minutia. Picture straighteners, arrangers of junk drawers, creators of spreadsheets—all Virgo.

But honestly, someone has to do this stuff, right? “For want of a nail!” Virgo cries, already grabbing the hammer to fix whatever has gone awry.

No wonder Virgos can get anxious. Let’s look deeper, though, and consider the real Virgo.

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This sign is humble, not a virtue much prized in our culture of narcissism. The word humility derives from humus, the layers of topsoil that grow our food, and keep forests, grasslands, and meadows vibrant and green.

We may walk all over humus while ignoring it, but we won’t survive long without it.

Humus is created through decay. We are entering autumn, the time when the remains of the harvest begin turning back to the soil from which they grew. There is richness here. This is where we find the mycelia of mushrooms, the network that binds forest ecosystems together.

Dirt is so much more than we ever imagined. So is Virgo.

New Moons are times to plant seeds, seeds of our wishes and intentions. We are offered exceptionally fertile ground with this year’s Virgo New Moon.

This New Moon arrives with power.

This is a supermoon, very close to the Earth. Tides will be stronger and higher, which is not good news for Florida, where Hurricane Dorian is expected on Monday.

Virgo tends to be reserved when it comes to expressing emotion, yet Virgo’s inner life is often quietly intense. If you are facing emotional situations, you might find your inner tides feel strong. Turn to Virgo energy to channel those intense feelings into practical action.

The closest aspect to this New Moon is a tight trine to Uranus at 6 Taurus. How does cautious Virgo cope with contact from the trickster revolutionary?

Better than you might think, actually.

With Uranus, we face the inevitably of change. We are changing. We have changed. We will be changing more.

Virgo is fine with this. She is intimately familiar with the cycles of the earth. She knows, better than anyone, that everything that grows will die, that change is the only constant. Virgo goes beyond acceptance of this truth to celebrate it.

Virgo loves to organize and prepare not to create stasis but to be ready for transformation.

This New Moon happens in the first decan of Virgo, for which Austin Coppock offers the image of a tree bearing fruit. To receive the fruits of our own wishes and intentions, we need good soil. We need to tend our trees carefully. We need to be like Virgo.

Where will this New Moon fall in your chart? In which House? Aspecting which of your planets and points?

The placement of this New Moon can point to where our lives call for tending, where patient and careful work can yield good fruit, and where humility and service can lead to greater success than pushing forward.

Virgo is associated with grain goddesses in their maidenly rather than more maternal aspects. Modern culture associates the image of the maiden with innocence, naiveté, and vulnerability. The maiden needs protection. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She is virginal.

This is not how the ancient world viewed the maiden and specifically the virgin.

Virginity did not refer to a lack of sexual experience but rather the quality of being one-in-herself. Virgin goddesses were not defined as anyone’s daughter, sister, wife, mother, but as her own, on her own. Think of Artemis and Athena.

This way of looking at the virgin comes to us from very ancient matrifocal cultures, not from the patriarchal ones that followed.

Interestingly, Hera herself, in her most ancient forms, went through a ritual each spring in which she became virgin once again. How much more intriguing is this image of her, than the peevish, shrewish wife of Zeus we learned of in school.

The New Moon is also conjunct the fixed star Regulus, Cor Leonis, the heart of the Lion, one of the four royal stars.

How is it that the heart of the constellation Leo now appears in the zodiac sign Virgo? This happens because of precession, which is the wobble in our earth’s axis that changes how the stars appear in our skies, plus the fact that Western astrology is a seasonal astrology rather than a strictly star-based one.

In Western astrology, the signs of the zodiac form a band of twelve equal territories named for constellations but designed to follow the seasons. Relative to this fixed band, the stars themselves shift.

This is fine. It’s a choice; one way to structure our conversation with the cosmos.

This movement of the royal star Regulus into Virgo brings the benefits and challenges of this powerful guardian into a new, humble place. It raises interesting questions.

How might we want to define leadership from a Virgoan perspective? Maybe instead of leaders who are bombastic, flamboyant, and dominant, we might look for leaders who are humble. Who lead by example. Who walk their talk.

It turns out that Regulus is not a singular star but rather a star system, including four and possibly more stars. Can we move from the idea of the strong leader (singular and so often male) into something more collaborative? Something that looks more like mycelia, networks of sharing knowing that somehow manage to get the work done?

Remember that our wishes and intentions for each New Moon can include wishes for the world as well as our personal lives. And we can wish to have, to find, to create networks and communities that embody the best characteristics of a Virgo New Moon trine Uranus in Taurus.

We’re in new territory here. New is what we desperately need. New ways to imagine our communities. New ways to manage the complex systems in which we all participate.

Lucky for us, Virgo knows a lot about cycles. This is an energy that can endlessly renew itself. Perhaps that’s the biggest wish we could make at this New Moon: Learning how to change with grace and humility, and through that change, find our power.

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I use Unsplash for most of my photo illustrations.

All astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the cherries by Yoksel Zok,
and the following images:
pears by Shumilov Ludmila,
pomegranates by Pratiksha Mohanty,
the constellation Leo from Wikipedia