angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
If Full Moons indicate times of conflict and climax, then the Gemini culmination of this particular Sadge lunar cycle will undoubtedly be felt by many as a considerably heated one.
For those observing the night skies in parts of North America and Europe just 9 minutes after the Full Moon (04:08 UTC) on December 8, you may also witness the Full Moon pass in front of Mars, a phenomenon known as an occultation. An occultation of Uranus occurs three days earlier (Dec 5).
According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a Full Moon that rises during one of the longest nights of the year (or shortest in the Southern Hemisphere) is called the “Moon Before Yule,” in honour of the pagan festival of the Sun’s passing into the Capricorn Solstice (December 22). These days, it’s known as a “Cold Moon”, a name that describes the frigid conditions of this time of year.
Exact at 16°02′ Gemini, this “Cold Moon” will be the last Full Moon of 2022, and its conjunction to “Red Hot” Mars suggests that our most personal affairs could “blow hot & cold”, in case you have not already noticed in the days leading up to this event.
The Full Moon Phenomenon
The lunation cycle observes the key synodic phases between our luminaries, Sun and Moon. The Sun (spirit/ego/father) is our earth’s nearest and brighter star, while the Moon (soul/cellular body/mother) is our closest celestial object. Astrologically, the synodic cycle illuminates and shadows our most intimately personal evolution. The Moon acts as a mediatrix, catering to our ego needs, gently and uniformly distributing the solar potential (spiritual nourishment and energy) to where it is required.
At New Moon, when the Sun and Moon reset, we experience the spiritual-solar emanation of ‘seed ideas’ or ‘intentions’ – spiritual entities that are emanated into the universe whenever the spirit sees a need for them. Two weeks later, at the Full Moon, when the Sun and Moon are diametrically opposite with the earth in the centre, we experience the manifestation of those seed ideas as an organic fulfilment of those personal needs, be they through cells or personalities.
In this way, the Moon serves both Earth (physical self) and Sun (spirit self), softly releasing the light of the Sun and nourishing the organic and psychic ego needs of all earthly creatures.
Hence, Full Moons mark the climactic peak of the lunation cycle when psycho-mental energies are most divergent. In the negative sense, Full Moons stress an irreconcilable enmity between solar and lunar forces by their most extreme lack of affinity. In the most positive sense, the Full Moon distinguishes the highest possible manifestation of a new vision, a revelation, a sense of fulfilment and revived purpose in our affairs.
Since the Sun changes zodiac signs every 30 days, the emphasis of our attention shifts gradually through each facet of our horoscope, allowing us to experience ourselves in every aspect.
The Sagittarius-Gemini Dichotomy
In Sagittarius, the Sun imbues all life with a passionate desire to explore vaster mental horizons and worlds foreign to its traditional habitats and limitations.
The desire is to expand, to know more, and deal with the bigger issues, often with some degree of zeal and enthusiasm and usually in terms of purely abstract, general principles or concepts.
However, this desire to expand may lack a sense of proportion and realism, requiring a sense of perspective; a reference point that provides a constructive form to our concepts and abstractions.
The Gemini Moon assists with providing this baseline most objectively. In Gemini, Luna shows us where we tend to scatter our energies, pursue too many interests, and try to incorporate too many ideas or people into our life. At this Full Moon, we may start to notice how, in our restlessness and longing to know more, we tend to flit from one pursuit or idea to another, often exhibiting careless or sloppy behaviours, only superficially grasping each endeavour.
Others may show up to tell us where we become too carried away with ourselves, our theories, or incoherent stories, trying to gain control over our reality by logic, substituting hypotheses for real experience, or philosophising endlessly about mundane happenings that carry no relevance or provide no meaning to the way we live our lives.
Conflicts occur when we focus too much on inconsequential matters or become lost in higher conceptual realms that bear no relation to our day-to-day lives.
By polar opposition, the Gemini Moon seeks to help us apply and disperse the wisdom gained from the Sagittarius Sun and form a simple, succinct singleness of purpose that allows us to make constructive daily choices and integrate our experiences in a way that enables us to perceive, formulate and convey our ideas more effectively.
As the Sun/Moon energies stand apart, back-and-forth communication intensifies. The more we engage in passionate discussions with others, the more we are challenged to articulate and explain our theories clearly and in a cohesive way.
To this effect, the Gemini Full Moon ensures that our Sagittarian wisdom is true, credible and applicable to our day-to-day lives. Through our intellectual exchanges, we are presented with the ultimate reality check, and full accountability is expected to prevent us from becoming lost in lofty abstractions and higher-level concepts irrelevant to our everyday circumstances.
Of course, if we are not making sense, we should expect a swift, unbiased rebuke that puts us firmly in our place. If we deny or avoid this need for veracity, we may exasperate those we most seek to impress, losing credibility, trust or the expressed interest of others.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT YOUR OWN CHART
Book your Private Session with Ang
Planetary Aspects to this Lunation
At this point, warrior god Mars has been transiting Gemini since August 20, moving retrograde on October 20. This phenomenon has effectively heated up this highly intellectual constellation for nearly 4 months.
As the Moon enters this mutable/air sign, it personalises any mental activity and aggression into our intimate discussions. Intellectual exchanges, arguments and debates, feisty agreements and heated disagreements become increasingly common.
During Mars’s sustained square to Neptune (Oct-Nov), we have developed considerable sensitivity in our defensiveness. Our tendency for argumentativeness and irritability has created significant stress. We have seen the proliferation of outspoken critics on sensitive topics, touchy media activists, and reactive journalists expressing a great deal of restlessness and unease about what they believe to be distorted facts, misinformation, and propaganda. In many cases, this has been met with equally distorted critique, absurd assertions, protestation and condemnation.
By now, the somewhat disoriented Mars’ near exact conjunction with the Full Moon only triggers strongly reactive feelings, which can manifest as anger, tamper tantrums, and other emotional eruptions due to sentiments of being cheated, lied to or misused.
- The Moon’s occultation of Mars hints at a blocked vitality and vexation bristling to be released.
- Mars is out-of-bounds, meaning his force is potentially wild and unruly.
- Mars is also retrograde, so his otherwise explicit energy is internalised; highly subjectified (modified or affected by personal views, experiences, or motives).
The culminating Moon’s activation of Mars indicates someone harbouring repressed anger or resentment is now likely to find expression.
As a result of venting bottled-up, convoluted mental anger, we may lose sight of caution and common sense, prompting all kinds of audacious campaigns for our own boutique brand of ‘causes’, staging unusual comebacks from debilitating circumstances. All this may be justified by the actor. Sadly, an occulted, out-of-bounds, retrograde Mars in Gemini commonly symbolises the worked-up purveyor of pseudo-intellectual nonsense.
Many ideologically unsound issues are possibly coming to a head now. Finding innovative solutions to settle long-held grievances and disputes is possible but must be treated gingerly and prudently. We must not assume to know the answers.
Harmonious aspects from Chiron and Eris suggest there is enough capacity to empathically listen to those who feel hurt, ideologically wounded, sidelined or shut out of the discussion and understand their pain.
Much can be accomplished when we treat these complex energies with foresight, wisdom and compassion. On the other hand, selfish, irritable, hasty reactions, mixed with a refusal to find common ground, leads to greater alienation, retribution and even war due to irreconcilable differences over fundamental values and beliefs.
Other Planetary Influences
The ongoing tensions from squares between Pluto/Eris and Saturn/Uranus have been discussed at length in previous articles and recapped here in our latest Cosmic Bus episode.
Mercury squares Jupiter here and, as co-rulers of this lunation, indicates that the hive of ideas is too ambitious or grandiose for realisation. Mercury’s activation of the contentious Saturn/Uranus midpoint is strong, meaning radical ideas and those who champion them find it hard to implement with enough practical detail to be helpful.
Under these transits, it appears the proponents to change and reform is not well organised enough, lacking the necessary balance and realism to be adequately convincing with their concepts and opinions. They are acting too recklessly, lack maturity, usually in too much of a hurry, wanting to implement great things before they have persuaded all stakeholders who may be sceptical, promising more than they can deliver.
Mentally, we can tend to attempt things beyond our capacities. Something is not sitting well when the conscious mind is at odds with our gut feeling. We may lack common sense and proportion in our thinking, coming off too bombastic, rude and reckless, and despite our best intentions, lose favour in any encounter.
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is the general maxim here, and those who speak without thinking or make agreements/sign contracts without checking the fine print will generally come to regret their actions at this time.
Context and Synthesis
Since the November 26 New Moon, the world has seen massive anti-government protests over allegations of human rights violations in Iran and China against COVID-19 lockdowns, with remarkable anger spilling into the streets against hardline regimes.
There has also been considerable upset in the world of information-sharing media platform Twitter around censorship, with massive staff layoffs and the reinstatement of controversial influencers such as Donald Trump, Kanye West (now “Ye”), Jordan Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene (all Geminis) and Andrew Tate (Sagittarian). Singer Ye later went on an ‘offensive campaign’, eventually prompting permanent suspension from Twitter and losing massive corporate sponsors for his inflammatory conduct.
During a debate on whether to trust the mainstream media (Nov 30), outspoken commentator Douglas Murray and veteran reporter Matt Taibbi triumphed over their opponents, persuading a significant audience segment to give up faith in an institution they claim to be hopelessly biased.
Matt Taibi was also instrumental in the audacious release by Elon Musk of the “Twitter files” on how and why Twitter employees blocked The NY Post’s 2020 bombshell story about ‘Hunter Biden’s laptop’.
Other Silicon Valley darlings have been revealed not to be prodigious geniuses of our time, with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried single-handedly crashing the entire crypto market and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos being sentenced to 11 years for fraud.
The last two weeks have seen many public instances demonstrating brazen defiance of official narratives by ‘trusted’ authorities and institutions. Misinformation and skewed thinking from all angles have created vast gaps between what we wish to believe and what we really must hear.
No matter where one stands, the basis of any ideological unrest, whether moral, ethical, legal, philosophical, or religious in principle, enough reactive anger and convulsive clashes are commonplace. Ironically these escalating disturbances are struggling to restore balance and symmetry.
Regrettably, any Sun/Moon imbalance involving Mars presents a situation where we often perceive life as a threat, we find peoples’ ideas challenging, and we are motivated to fight others for sovereignty and personal dominance, usually adopting a combative and assertive stance in an attempt to prove our self-worth. It is almost inevitable that intermittent arguments, dissension, and heated conflict will ensue due to rash expression of ill-understood beliefs, a clash of inner energies that attempt to either/both reconcile or break apart an argument, often through a clever show of intellectual strength.
Under this ‘hot/cold’ Moon, this competitiveness may not bring us much peace, but we must acknowledge that it is usually our own aggressive vibration that tends to attract similar types of people and power struggles, whether at work or home life. If you give crazy attention, crazy gets crazier.
To avoid conflict and disillusionment, we may need to adjust our expectations of others. It’s best to accept a more realistic appreciation of the diversity of our ideas and beliefs rather than fuelling ongoing conflicts by not considering the feelings and needs of others.
Dealing With Anger
Let us acknowledge that anger is a normal human emotion that can be reasonable and effective in certain situations, such as when we feel threatened with injury or harm. However, difficulty controlling our anger can cause problems and negatively affect our professional and personal relationships.
Whilst negatively expressed anger impacts our external relationships, repressing it affects our health. Unexpressed anger has been linked to heart disease, bulimia, diabetes, and road accidents. People with serious anger management issues should seek professional treatment.
Several factors contribute to anger, including mental/emotional instability, depression, substance abuse and alcoholism. Social influences may include financial or professional problems, family issues, stress or anxiety in work or home environments. Our capacity to forgive can be a powerful tool that we can employ to significantly reduce anger and lead to finding a sustainable solution to our issues.
Synopsis
We live in a world governed by archaic, anachronistic control structures and questionable systems of disseminating views and ideas. Understandably, we may rise angrily to assert ourselves against these, be they parents, teachers, clerics, bosses or leaders, because we feel they do not listen.
Reform is happening, but too slowly for some, it seems. We must learn to test out and apply new techniques and innovations to defend true freedom of speech, discourse, and debate and fairly regulate its use and misuse. Our words can be powerful and must be held or expressed responsibly. In any event, seismic progress in this area is inevitable because the Uranian influence upon Saturn in Aquarius is irrepressibly unconquerable, albeit hugely disruptive.
In the meantime, there will always be someone trying to strip down our ethical standpoint and skewer our sacred cows, especially when we continue to perceive life in black-and-white terms. In a climate where many people feel constrained and afraid to express themselves, willing to believe anything they’re told and never question the external narrative, contentious disputes are likely to lead to horrible dissent, discord and even war.
We should engage with social causes and pressure groups under this Full Moon, where we can put our partisan approach and abundant energy to constructive use. Peace, love, and universal understanding will always prevail if we maintain a balanced perspective on our beliefs and attitudes, celebrate a diversity of opinion, and do not try to convert others by forceful proselytizing or dogmatic expression.
Many blessings, and enjoy this glorious Full Moon xx
Please support this work to stay independent and ad-free with your subscription to my invaluable Horoscope tools and Cosmic Bus series. Sign up here.
