The Full Moon arrives tonight with a Scorpio Moon opposite not only the Sun but also Uranus, Venus, and Mercury in Taurus.
The tension between Scorpio and Taurus focuses on the question of what is real.
Taurus is all about the manifest world, everything we can touch, hear, smell, taste, and see.
Taurus has a great love and respect for the natural world. This sign understands that natural cycles take as long as they take and cannot be rushed.
Taurus loves the good things of life. A great meal. A relaxing massage. Taurus loves fine crafting especially in natural media like wood and fiber and stone.
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Scorpio is all about the unseen, which Taurus would prefer to dismiss as the unreal. But Scorpio knows that emotions and intuitions and the clair senses: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, are also real. In fact, Scorpio knows that being in touch with what we cannot sense through our “normal” senses is what keeps us safe and oriented in this world.
So in a lunar cycle in which the aspect patterns have had us thinking about building new worlds, this Scorpio Full Moon asks, what’s underneath?
This is not as simple a question as it seems.
What’s underneath includes our emotions. Rationalists like to dismiss emotion as dangerously illogical. Also as female, which it’s not exclusively, but, whatever. Cognitive science now knows that we cannot, literally cannot, remember anything unless there is some emotion connected to it.
What’s underneath is the subconscious. Since Freud’s elucidation of the subconscious as a vital part of every psyche, we have stumbled across the relevance of this concept–the idea that much of the material in our own psyches is inaccessible to us–again and again.
What’s underneath is also what is willfully hidden. Here we find secrets, lies, erasures, gaslighting, and all the ways we misdirect and deceive ourselves and others.
Full Moons illuminate. Tonight’s Scorpio Full Moon will shine a light, if only a lunar one, on what we don’t usually see, or what we prefer not to see.
The Full Moon is squared by Saturn in Aquarius. This Saturn faces into the future, ready to build something new, vast, principled, and visionary. The Scorpio Moon asks, what is the shadow side of all this Aquarian light? Are things really as clean and clear and pure as they seem?
Of course, with Scorpio, we know the answer is, oh, hell, no.
Saturn squares the Full Moon and Uranus is conjunct the Sun which means we’re putting the spotlight on the Saturn–Uranus square that defines 2021.
This square has a “Clash of Titans” feel to it. Uranus represents the force of radical change. Saturn stands up for tradition and authority and safety in the more conservative sense. And this is where the world is now as well.
Can we revolutionize how we humans interact with the planet, for example, to keep things livable? Or are we going to cling to old ways of generating power and traveling and so on, as we slowly erode sustainability? These are huge questions that often seem beyond our individual reach.
The presence of the Moon says, each of us is in this too. What happens on the largest of world stages affects each one of us.
Scorpio’s modern ruler is Pluto in late Capricorn. Pluto is not actively aspecting this Full Moon, but we’re still reverberating from the impact Pluto has had in 2020. We know we’re in transformative territory.
Scorpio’s traditional ruler is Mars, who has recently arrived in Cancer, which is the Moon’s home sign. This means the Moon and Mars are in mutual reception, visiting each other’s houses and communicating better than they might usually. Or perhaps I should say, sharing in ways they might not usually.
Mars is not as his best in Cancer. He likes to be free to act without being swamped by emotions. He’s not interested in vulnerability or anything that gets in the way of direct movement.
Mars is also out of bounds, functioning outside the constraints of the Sun’s power.
For all these reasons, emotions run high at this Full Moon. At the same time, direct expression, or even understanding, might elude us. The mutual reception between the Moon and Mars might leave us feeling swamped even as it highlights how essential it is to make room for feelings, to honor them, to respect their power.
The body doesn’t lie. Unacknowledged and unhealed trauma can and will undercut all our efforts to find “rational” and “reasonable” and “practical” solutions to our deepest issues.
As we move into this Scorpio Full Moon, areas of our own psyches we tend to ignore, or where our feelings don’t match our outward ideals, or where we haven’t processed anger or trauma, might be highlighted.
The key thing to notice here is that whatever we learn is something we need to know to move toward the new worlds, the new ways of living, we desire. It might be uncomfortable. It will be immensely valuable.
The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from galaxy by Graham Holtshausen,
and the following images:
shadow hand by Kurniawan kami saputra,
cable posts by Miguel, and
wooden bowl by Alex