This year’s Harvest Moon is also a blue Moon–the second Full Moon this month. It was cloudy here last night, Friday, but Thursday, the almost-full glow of the rising Moon shone down with glorious beauty.
She was accompanied: Above the rising Moon was Mars, clearly visible in his closest approach to the Earth in two years, fierce and strong in his fiery retrograde.
The significance of this Full Moon shines as brightly as its orb in the night sky. Sun @ 8 Scorpio, Moon @ 8 Taurus, these two are the manifest and the hidden, the world we apprehend with our physical senses and the occult world that reveals itself to the clair senses.
Taurus and Scorpio carry the polarity of life and death, showing in their pairing that these two states are parts of larger, ongoing cycles. Neither is an ending, neither is beginning in the fixed, linear sense. They flow one from the other, each required, each welcomed.
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If the idea of death and life as partners in a dance, instead of the ultimate win or lose, feels radical, look no further than Uranus, very tightly conjunct the Moon @ 8 Taurus and opposing the Sun.
Taurus and Scorpio are fixed signs, patterns that prefer and seek to create stability. With Uranus, nothing is stable. Change is the only constant.
Life and death. The seen and unseen worlds. And change, the trickster change agent par excellence. I’m reminded of the Judgement card in the Tarot.
The image of Judgement from the Golden Dawn deck and afterward evokes the Christian idea of being judged and then sent to heaven or hell.
Historically, though, before the Golden Dawn period, the card showed an angel flying over opening graves who represented the triumph over death that eternal life offered. The image is from Revelations, the most mystical, and some would say most pagan, of the books in the canonical Bible.
So one question from this Full Moon is, where are we alive and where are we dead, inside? It’s been one hell of a year. As this Full Moon fills the sky, we’re heading into a crucial challenge. Yes, the US election, with the world watching.
What has happened for us and to us this year? Far too many have faced death, as a fear, as a companion, as an unwelcome part of our lives. Where are we in that relationship?
We’ve felt threatened this year. No matter how privileged we are, there’s anxiety about change, loss, and how our way of life could be affected. Too many truly are threatened, every day. Health care professionals. All workers in contact with the public. Ordinary citizens within marginalized communities of all kinds. How are we managing what we and those around us are facing?
We’ve experienced many reactions over the course of the year: Anxiety, hope, fear, confidence, anger, determination, fear again, depression, joy, despair, comfort, love. It’s exhausting to remember where we’ve been, difficult to remember, especially when the year and its challenges are not over.
Yet here we are at this amazing Full Moon, being shown something important to our understanding. What do we see? What do we feel?
This is a moment of recognition and confirmation. The Taurus Full Moon is ruled by Venus who has just entered Libra, her own sign. The Moon herself is exalted in Taurus, strong in her ability to nurture all living things.
Taurus also brings us the Earth Mother, Hathor of Egypt, cow-eyed goddess of beauty and love, or the Lady of the Beasts, ancient guardian of the wild, or the Earth in all their glory and majesty.
Mercury too is in Libra, retrograding in from Scorpio. Our minds and hearts are balanced, seeking to include everyone in creating and nurturing solutions.
And here comes Uranus to shake up the world, as if we needed more uncertainty.
Yet maybe we do. Maybe we need fresh ideas, radical perspectives, new understandings of the world we’re in and how we can thrive within it.
This is the season of Samhain. Today, by the calendar, we’ve reached the beginning of the ancient Celtic year. Tonight at dusk, as the Full Moon rises, we enter a new year in the dark.
For the Celts, time began in darkness. Day begins at dusk, which is why our Halloween is All Hallow’s Eve. The year begins at the dark time, now, as the season of growth ends. We complete the harvest, gather in the herds, and build up the fires.
This is the time of storytellers, of the ancestors. We recount our histories and tales of great challenges and great deeds. The world of the unseen draws close both to listen and to remind us.
A vital tradition at this time of year is setting a place at the table that is left empty. This is the place for the unseen stranger, one who is welcomed, fed, honored.
This year, Uranus is the unseen guest. We feel the stirrings of great changes. We know in our bones we’re living in a time when power is shifting. We know things will not return to the way they were twelve months ago.
And we don’t know the outcome. We’ve got lots of ideas and hopes and fears about it, but we don’t know.
Astrologically, Samhain arrives when the Sun reaches 15 Scorpio. This year, that happens on November 6. I’m fascinated by this stretch of time and how it brackets the US election. The results are very unlikely to be clear by November 6, yet we’ll have been through a watershed experience unlike anything seen before.
Perhaps Uranus is here now to offer the comfort of uncertainty. Yes, comfort. An odd concept, I know, but consider it. In that moment when the dice have been thrown but not yet landed, anything can happen. A new world can suddenly appear. A new chance.
From one perspective, this can sound like escapism. No, no, we say, we must deal with the problems before us. We can’t hide within bright imaginings. There’s work to be done.
Uranus does not deny the work, but points out that uncertainty is quite real, always present, and the very thing that allows creation to happen.
If it were all certain, all set, all done, then why live at all? Why engage, grapple, think, love, fight, create, despair, or hope? We exist in moments of uncertainty and that’s where the magic is.
It’s a Full Moon. The trickster is here. Mercury, another trickster, is dancing backwards. We don’t know what the next moment holds, let alone the year ahead. Let’s tell the old tales, share what we have, gather around fires linked virtually this year but warming nonetheless.
The world is changing. Welcome the endless possibilities that holds.
The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the Full Moon by Daniel Lincoln,
and the following images:
the reflected world by Louis Maniquet,
the bonfire by Kevin Wolf, and
the dice by Alperen Yazgı.