The Full Moon in Scorpio arrives tomorrow morning just before dawn, which means it will be most full in the sky tonight. This is the Flower Moon and also the last supermoon of this year.
This Full Moon is the Buddhist festival of Wesak, which commemorates the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. This is one of the most sacred and happiest celebrations in the Buddhist tradition.
Falling, this year, within a few days of Beltaine, we still feel the bright energies of the hinge in the Celtic calendar that opens the light half of the year. This is a time when the veils between the worlds are thin. A time when the fae visit the natural world openly, celebrating with and among humans, animals, birds, trees, plants, and all living things.
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We are in an active astrological time. These first two weeks of May are crowded with incident. We just experienced a Mercury cazimi in Taurus and the shifting of the Nodes of the Moon into Gemini and Sagittarius.
Venus will soon station for her retrograde in Gemini. Already, she is moving very slowly, preparing us for an inner exploration of Venusian connection, creation, and (in Gemini) communication.
At the Full Moon, Mercury will be separating from the Sun but still combust, hidden from us. The trickster now has his boon, his prize, but we need to wait a bit longer before we can see clearly what it is.
In fact, Mercury has more transformation to undergo. In two days, still under the beams of the Sun, he will trine Pluto. Hermes (Mercury) is a psychopomp, the only one of the Greek gods able to travel freely between the heights of Olympus and Hades’ depths.
This is precisely what he does now, moving from conjunction with the Sun to trining Pluto before emerging back into ordinary time. What will he have to share?
Venus is close to the North Node in Gemini. Because of her almost-retrograde, though, they will not meet, not until early August. Again, there are messages here, things to learn and explore and understand, but we need to wait to receive them fully.
The Full Scorpio Moon trines Neptune in Pisces. This powerfully magical connection means these next two nights, just before and then after the Full Moon, may bring powerful dreams. We might receive intuitive messages in other ways as well, if we are open to them.
Clearly, this is a magical Full Moon.
The polarity between Taurus and Scorpio captures two very different modes of perception. Taurus is all about the manifest world we apprehend with sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Taurus glories in these wonderful expressions of Gaia.
Scorpio focuses on the clair senses, mysterious, occult perceptions that many in science and religion and logic tell us do not, cannot exist: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, psychokinesis, and, I don’t know if there is a word for this, but I’ve had experiences of psychic scent as well, some shared with others.
This year, social distancing compels us to refocus on our clair senses.
Last night, the Uisneach Fire was lit on the high hill in the center of Ireland, despite the cancellation of public celebration. The Keeper of the Hill and his immediate family built a huge bonfire surrounded by torches is the shape of a very large heart. This gave so many a chance to connect with that sacred fire and place while not physically present.
Wesak festivals of purification and celebration likewise cannot include gatherings. Buddhist teachers and leaders have invited inner celebration and connection through spirit.
We are called to enliven our clair senses to create connections not currently possible in the manifest world. We’re asked to experience and realize deeply that such connections are every bit as real as the physical ones we rely on.
Alchemy partakes of this Taurus–Scorpio polarity as well. Often presented as the foolish attempts of early chemists to create gold from base metals, alchemy has also a magical side. The process is one of soul-making, also used by Carl Jung to describe processes of deep psychological growth he called individuation.
In an early phase of the alchemical process, the Sun, the self as we know it, disappears. It may turn black. It may also encounter the Green Lion. Chemically, the green lion is vitriol or in some cases a form of nitric acid. But there is another way to understand this process.
Some alchemists linked the green lion to the natural, vegetative world, as did the poet Dylan Thomas. In this model, our deep encounters with Nature as Gaia challenge our human view of ourselves as unique, separate beings.
We encounter the world of nature and we are changed utterly.
This too is happening for those of us with any access to natural settings these days. Separated from our usual social contacts, and in some cases experiencing much more contact with those we live with, we seek solace in forests, mountains, fields and meadows, along lakes and rivers.
We will not emerge from our current crisis, which spans society, economy, and governance as well as health, the same as we were before.
Many have died. More will follow. These are tragic losses. Many offer heroic service. Many are experiencing a complete shredding of their way of life with no clear path forward. A few are becoming even wealthier than before.
As a great wizard once said, Not even the wisest can see all ends.
Yet this Full Moon offers a call and a path. What is behind, beneath, around, within the manifest world we know?
For some, the answer lies in one of the faith traditions. But connecting with the magic of the earth does not require faith or any particular religious belief. It requires only an openness to our own faculties of perception, the ones we tend to ignore because we’ve always been told they are wrong, foolish, illogical, demonic, illusory.
The thing is, our ordinary perceptions can be just as unreliable, as foolish, as mistaken. So why limit what we can know and how we know it?
Perhaps because modern society prefers us to listen to official voices rather than our inner wisdom. Perhaps our traumatic separation from the natural world has cut us off from those hidden voices. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t claim to know all the reasons.
This Full Moon, though, asks us to see, hear, touch, taste, smell the world in new ways. To be fully present to the world of nature (Taurus) while also allowing space for the mysterious, the hidden, the magical (Scorpio).
Tonight we can choose to cleanse the doors of perception and meet the green lion, who only appears to devour us. His real mission is to enliven us, through and through, with the wonders and power of Gaia.
The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the full moon by chuttersnap,
and the following images:
the Uisneach bonfire from a story appearing in RTE, and
alchemical engravings from old manuscripts.