angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
Lunar eclipses are not your ordinary Full Moons. Their cycle extends beyond their month, influencing the tone and feel of much of our year, especially if it forms significant aspects to our natal chart. Its accompanying Solar eclipse leaves a distinct impact along themes described more succinctly by the relationship to the Moon’s Nodal Axis.
The Lunar Eclipse in Taurus is famous for enhancing psychic intuition and spiritual insight. Sacred places, the soil, the psycho-sexual body and the Earth herself are heightened in magnetic effects. This kind of sensitivity can be either healing or disturbing.
In one sense, this lunation highlights where we are inclined to be overly preoccupied with satisfying material and physical desires, indulging ourselves in the pleasures of the senses. Over the recent months, as the intensity of this eclipse builds, we will have seen where we developed considerable inertia, allowing the build-up of tension to become unbearable until it has begun to erupt in a powerful and often destructive manner.
Brooding in self-pity, wallowing in low self-esteem or negativity about our interpersonal inadequacies could result in unsatisfying relationships and even degrading sexual behaviours, which leaves us feeling soul-starved and even more at the mercy of our desires.
Finding easy ways to fulfil or sublimate frustrated sexual energies can become channelled into strange compulsions, addictions, or perverted into perfunctory ways to manipulate others into conforming to our will. During this period, it would be an understatement to say that we are prone to monstrous interpersonal conflicts because of our inability to resolve obsessive desires.
With JUPITER as the t-squared focal planet of this epic lunation, emotional excesses and impractical views thwart progress in the affairs influenced by the lunar eclipse and Jupiter, calling for emotional restraint and sound judgment.
Jupiter in Aquarius lends a blind optimism and often over-the-top moral push in his pursuit to integrate humanitarian, progressive, reformist sociopolitical elements into our lives. However, a sociologically determined belief system that is cause-oriented towards a ‘better society’ assumes too much. In reaction, it generates a radical, revolutionary, utopian, impractical, pseudo-liberal state of mind, which rather inclines many to exercise poor judgment and impracticality concerning future matters.
Too often, when we espouse our beliefs into big ‘hopes for the future’, we also tend to overlook immediate realities. We may talk up our utopian visions or woke ideologies, exaggerate our noblest intentions, we may even travel incessantly, not merely for business or enjoyment, but to avoid dealing with the dire existential issues now plaguing humanity and surmounting in our daily life. We focus instead on grandiose schemes and dreams that are unlikely to be accomplished since we’re effectively glossing over or ignoring the real matters at hand. These pie-in-the-sky projections come undone as the fabric of today’s society starts to tear at the seams trying to keep up with Jupiter’s inflations.
Among social lessons, this eclipse shows where we may personally be somewhat overconfident and overbearing, inclined to overextend and overcommit ourselves, believing so entirely in our capacity to achieve the impossible that we haplessly or arrogantly impinge upon the prerogatives and rights of all those around us.
Of course, the effects of any eclipse are usually months, even years in the making, and its post-residuals are long-lasting, leaving a permanent impact on our lives and our societies. This lunar eclipse is the longest of the century (its peak will last 3 hours, 28 minutes). Falling just a few degrees shy of being a total eclipse, at just over 6 hours in duration, this is the longest partial lunar eclipse in 580 years. This fact, in itself, is a symbolic marker of the importance of some of its themes in relative terms.
Physically, an excessive approach to anything in life results in weight gain and liver disorders. Psychologically, a lack of moderation leads to becoming carried away with experiences, activities and relationships. If you’re noticing that you’re becoming self-indulgent, lazy and extravagant, choosing quantity over quality, glutting yourself on more and more pleasurable experiences until you become bloated, then do not be surprised if something comes along to burst your overinflated bubble. One can only translate these to the corporate or political world.
Likewise, if we expect too much from others, demanding that they fulfil our ongoing needs and voracious appetites, being more of a taker than a giver, often acting in compulsive, indulgent or patronising ways, seeking to boost our ego or acclaim to power or wealth, then expect to see more pricks in your balloon.
Being a self-proclaimed preachy know-it-all, professing to have the answer to every question, while philosophically or ‘legally’ extricating yourself from every predicament, you may dogmatically and self-righteously have placed yourself under the most pernicious consequences this eclipse has to dish out to all its cosmic hypocrites. A cosmic bubble is about to be burst here.
HEALING
The Scorpio Sun will help transform our unconscious Taurean inertia and placidity, urging us to direct our conscious will toward discovering more profound pleasures than those of mere materialistic or hedonistic nature.
Penetrating to the very core of our psyche, Scorpio seeks to release potent regenerative energies, capable of transforming wounded matter into functionality in the material world again. Whilst this happens every year around this lunation, the next couple of years will be particularly intense around this theme since the Moon’s Nodes will transit the Scorpio/Taurus axis.
In the initial eclipse of its kind, we must look to work with the lessons of the current transits. Once we have learned to express the excesses of Jupiter in Aquarius more harmoniously, our confidence to be more socially coherent will spring from an ability to see ourselves in the context of others more truthfully, without pomp and hubris. We will find the balance necessary to overcome material attachments and learn to control insatiable appetites. Here, we get in touch with our inner teacher or guide and apply the insights and lessons we gain from our recent foolishness of overreaching or overindulgence back into every area of our lives.
The power of the Scorpio Sun enables us to satisfy, conquer, or sublimate our excessive desires. As it’s light becomes obscured from the Moon’s surface for a few hours, the celestial power outage leaves us with an intense sense of loss, one which we may already recognise. Its penetrating insight allows us to experience ourselves as more than just a greedy physical body and confront energies and laws that transcend the material plane.
Many of the things which our Taurean self has unconsciously accumulated could be eliminated and regenerated by Scorpio, who forces us to refine and remake our entire value system so that we can appreciate what is essential in our lives and rid ourselves of the baggage that characterises a life of overindulgence and ease at the expense of the poverty or disease of others.
Our Scorpionic sense of privacy, too, must be balanced with our Taurean sense of self-preservation and self-sufficiency, ensuring that we do not divulge information that leaves us feeling overly vulnerable or at the mercy of another’s power. If the Jupiterian element has encroached itself into our private lives by its overarching laws or practices of institutional invasiveness, limiting our capacity to define ourselves – this over-reach must become curbed. The soul requires a certain degree of inner freedom to commit itself to a purpose in which it fully (wholeheartedly) believes, without manipulation, temptation or coercion from outside influence.
Hence, deep down, if you see yourself refusing to follow any path which appears in front of you blindly, it is because you intend to carefully examine each possibility, acting only on those which accord with your own inner voice. Understand that growth does not necessarily mean endless proliferation and development, for sometimes, like an uncontrollable cancer, it can also malignantly devour all cells within reach.
Both Taurus and Scorpio are strong-willed, determined and resourceful signs; linked together, they can lead to phenomenal accomplishment. The eclipse t-square to Jupiter must be employed to deem that the quality of our involvement in each experience matters more than the number of our experiences. The Scorpio Sun can help us use our Taurean resources, and the resources others have and willingly share for mutual benefit.
Only by clearing away excesses described by this square can one advance the interests which will, in effect, test our integrity, moral standards and sense of decency. Our perceptiveness and ability to deal with conflict (to confront the darker side of human nature and harness its energy for higher purposes) will strengthen the force of our regenerating influence.
Here is an opportunity to take a balanced, healthy approach to life. If we are positive and optimistic, it is not because we are oblivious or insensitive to the suffering of others, but because we have experienced the pain within ourselves and in those around us. This potent eclipse offers us all a phenomenal awareness that even the most painful circumstances can lead us to deeper understanding and constructive action.
Let us now, at this Taurus lunation, ground our optimism, become open to reaching out to new experiences without overextending ourselves or making empty promises, staying mindful of our own limitations and respecting those of others, yet nevertheless losing faith in the future and in the ingenuity of human nature to come together and create harmony and peace as per nature’s laws. In letting go of the excesses, we attract true wealth – spiritually, emotionally, intellectually and materially – as we become cosmically attuned to attract and share onwards from our own, inner wealth.
Blessings, and have an amazing lunar eclipse xx
PS. This eclipse period will be challenging for many – as usual, I have included an extensive guide for each of the signs; please be sure to read your Sun & Rising sign for the full experience.
(Cover Art by Stuart Lippincott)
