New Moon in Cancer: Rebirth

We have come through the Cancer/Capricorn eclipse cycle having learned much. Perhaps more than we wanted to know.

Now we arrive at the end of Cancer season. In a few days, the Sun enters Leo, bright, creative, playful, and passionate.

This New Moon, landing as it does at the end of Cancer, the Moon’s home sign, is pregnant with possibility. We have the opportunity now to make good on our promises–to ourselves, to those we care about, to the world.

Are we prepared to fully embody the nurturing warmth that Cancer represents? Are we prepared to honor the past and our ancestors by bringing forth the most caring, most protective wisdom they have to offer?

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This New Moon chart is not an easy one. The New Moon opposes the heavy weight of the Capricorn group: Saturn, Pluto, and Jupiter accompanied by Pallas Athena.

We are being shown where our current structures of power have become toxic in the starkest of ways. Jupiter makes sure we don’t miss the point as we cope with an onslaught of messages and images showing where we are at risk. Where we are under attack.

The first impulse of a Cancerian New Moon would be to retreat. Gather up the people, bring them inside the walls where they can be safe, and set the guards to refuse entry to anyone else. Indeed, the asteroid Vesta, goddess of the hearth fire and conjunct the New Moon, reinforces this need. Above all, the fire at the center of the home must not go out.

But if we do this, we are already giving in to toxic patterns of the past because we will need to decide: Who gets in? Who must be left out? Who chooses? And some of our most potent enemies are invisible. The virus slips past barriers. Hatred and discrimination corrode any safety we think we have.

Action is needed. Action is essential.

The planetoid Eris, named for a goddess of discord and chaos, squares the New Moon and the Capricorn group. She is new to science and astrology but seems potent in current charts, where in my readings she shows up as a sign of our environmental crises and also the global dangers faced by women and children.

Eris is in Aries, the sign of direct action. She stands ready to cut through excuses, cut through calls for “further study” and “collecting more data.” We don’t have time, she says. Act now.

Fierce Lilith is there too, standing up for an unvarnished, straight-to-the-gut justice. Together with Eris, these two are formidable warriors.

The New Moon happens across the globe, of course, but impacts the US chart intensely. The Sibley chart is the one used most often as the birth chart of the USA, and here we see the New Moon conjunct the US Mercury and Part of Fortune, with the US Sun in Cancer nearby.

This New Moon opposes the US Pluto, which tells us the nation is about to experience its Pluto return, a time of reckoning with our past and all that is toxic within it. With this chart, it’s no wonder the examples of toxic power are so clear right here.

Yet even though Eris and Lilith in Aries stand ready to cut through dithering to get things moving, they do not advocate separation. Aries is a sign of leadership based in the archetype of the pioneer, the one who blazes a new trail, a new way forward, that others can follow.

This world has based so much of its history in division, leading to conflicts between nations, religions, peoples, social classes, political beliefs, and any other criterion of separation you can think of.

This New Moon offers another path. Unity. It’s time to cut through the old rhetoric of difference to find common ground in our shared humanity. Coming together as one world is possibly the most radically audacious, pioneering move we could make.

Preparing this essay today, I remembered the song We Are the World and checked its history. Recorded in January, 1985, the song, which went triple platinum, raised funds for the devastating famines in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa.

The project was initiated by Harry Belafonte, the song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, and produced by Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian. It was recorded by a supergroup of well known voices too long for me to list.

Listening in the lead in to this New Moon, the Cancerian heart of this song rings out:

There comes a time when we heed a certain call.
When the world must come together as one.
There are people dying.
It’s time to lend a hand to life.
The greatest gift of all.

Getting to that place where we are the world, and not just our little corner of it, will require more than singing together. This is why Eris and Lilith are vital to the New Moon.

John Lewis, a great man and great advocate of what is best in us and in the world, said: “We are one people, one family. We all live in the same house.”

He also said, “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

To reach the future we desire, we need some good trouble.

The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the dragonfly Dorothea OLDANI,
and the following images:
the pregnant silhouette by Jonathan Borba, and
the crab by Mae Mu.