Friday’s New Moon in Libra is saturated with the potent, ancient power of Shakti.

In a season of potent energetic gateways, Friday’s New Moon in Libra is in a class by itself.

* Sol and Luna trigger the world-changing energies of the Uranus-Pluto square and infuse it with Libra’s dynamic energy of relatedness. 

* Jupiter joins the action from Cancer, forming a potent and volatile Grand Square that brings the most dynamic expression of all four elements into the mix — and creates a universe all its own, a setting for alchemical magic.

* Venus, the ruler of the New Moon, creates radical new possibilities for feminine power, in a cosmic feminine power summit.  Joining Venus in this conclave will be the asteroids Persephone — the ancient Queen of the Underworld — and the once-mighty Pallas Athene.  The great star Algol — the ancient “demon star” of Medusa — will also be present.  And the asteroid Medusa herself is closing in on an intimate encounter with Uranus, the Cosmic Liberator.

* This Moon opens the portal to a season of breakthrough, with three cosmic events further breaking open the ground of our reality over the next month. By November 4, we will have participated in a lunar eclipse in Aries, the fourth Uranus- Pluto square, and a solar eclipse in Scorpio

Shakti is not only the cosmic energy that pervades the Universe — she is the Universe, a cosmic female being.

Venus, Persephone, Pallas Athene, & Algol:  Shakti Power Summit

Astrologically, Venus is one of the two primary carriers of the feminine energy in the Universe, For the last several thousand years, this energy has been better known — and loved — in India than anywhere else in the world.  It’s known as “Shakti,” which means “cosmic energy.” In the Hindu cosmology, Shakti is a psychopspirtual force that pervades the entire Universe. She’s the agent of creation and change, the dynamic and ever-changing love energy that stirs masculine energy and in so doing, gives rise to existence itself.   Every Hindu god has his Shakti, for she is the power source.

Shakti is the energy in all that exists. Saturated with Her, the Universe is “a powerful, creative, active, transcendent female being” who not only creates the world, but is the world, enlivening it with her creative power, as David Kinsley notes in  Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Yet, though she’s everywhere, in every moment, she’s also invisible to those of us in the West.  Since the Deep Time, we’ve become increasingly Shakti-blind and thus, desperately Shakti-starved. When astrophysicists talk about the “dark matter and energy” that comprises 96% of the Universe, they’re talking about the inner, magical essence of Shakti.

Astrology reminds us that this divine and magical energy is not separate from us.  She’s within us, as well as around us. Yet, we haven’t honored her.  We’ve raped her, exploited her, enslaved her — not only around us, but within us. The world we see around us is the result. Friday’s New Moon in Libra brings us to a pivot point in our relationship with Shakti — and hers with us.

The regal tulip known as Queen of the Night.

Venus, Persephone, and the Expansion of Feminine Power

At tomorrow’s New Moon, Venus will be within two degrees of an exact meeting with the asteroid Persephone (the exact conjunction will come a couple of days later). You could almost imagine this meeting as taking place between Hillary Clinton and one of the five Indigenous Grandmothers.

In the Deep Time — when the world as we know it was created by our changing consciousness– Persephone was renowned for her transformation from an innocent young goddess into the powerful Queen of the Underworld. This transformation was the focus of the most sacred rites in the world of ancient Greece — the Eleusinian Mysteries.

 Like all the expressions of the Feminine except Luna and Venus, Persephone has long been cast out of our consciousness.  Along with the great Ceres,her mother, and Pallas Athene, Juno, Vesta, Medusa, Hekate, and scores of others, the Queen of the Underworld now orbits the Sun in the great asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. These fragments of planetary energy are not, for the most part, integrated into our mainstream consciousness.

Venus, on the other hand, has had a very different life.  As one of only two astrological carriers of Shakti power through 5,000 years of patriarchy, she’s become both powerful and co-opted in our consciousness.  We all know how that goes. It’s how she — and we — have survived in a world where someone else holds the power.

What’s happening now, though, is unprecedented.  As Uranus and Pluto break open the very ground of our reality, the cast-off goddess energy takes on a new charge.  Take Venus’ and Persephone’ conjunction. It’s by no means the first.  These two meet every couple of years.  The last time, though, was almost two years ago — before the first of Uranus’ and Pluto’s seven squares.

We’re now within a month of the fourth square, and its potency is being dialed up by the Venus-ruled Libra New Moon. The energy in which Venus, Persephone, Pallas, and Algol confront each other is charged with revolutionary power.  With each one of these world-shaping, life-changing squares, the ground of our reality is opened a little deeper and a little wider.  Each one frees up more energy for us to use in re-imagining the consensus about how things are that we call “reality.”  Each one gives the status quo a little less energy.

The Queen of the Night, a terra-cotta plaque from ancient Mesopotamia, now in the British Museum.

Venus & Pallas, Persephone & Algol:  Good Girls Meet the “Bad” Ones

As we’ve acknowledged, surviving in patriarchy brought a certain price for Venus. The most magical qualities of the goddess of love, money, and bliss have been pushed into the shadows over the last five millennia.  The same thing happened to Pallas Athene back in the Deep Time.  The powerful wisdom goddess was re-imagined for a newly patriarchal world.  She lost her mother and acquired a new “birth” story that told of her emergence straight from her father’s head — the ultimate “Daddy’s girl” for the ages.

The most troubling aspect of Pallas Athena’s new life was her often punishing attitude towards other expressions of the Divine Feminine.  It was she who turned Medusa into a monster — and ordered that she be killed.  The unspeakable tragedy here is that many accounts link Medusa and Athena as two aspects of the same North African goddess. In destroying Medusa, Athena was killing off a part of her own self — her sexual, healing side that was as at home with the mysteries of death as of life.

But at this New Moon, Medusa is in the arms of the Liberator. And Agol and Venus are re-negotiating their alliance.

Venus & Algol: Re-Visiting an Ancient Crime

Since ancient times, the great star Algol has been associated with Medusa. In the 2nd-century Tetrabiblos,or “Star Book,” Algol is called the “demon star.”  Actually a binary star that eclipses itself every three days, Algol’s eclipsing “blink” was believed to be the long, slow wink of the eye in Medusa’s death-bringing, decapitated head.

It’s a cosmic conclave of Shakti power — and it’s happening in the most magical of all times.  This is a portent of Shakti on the move.

Queen of the Night, Emphyllum oxypetalum

Recreating Our Relationships with Shakti — Within Us & Around Us

Libra’s energy is that of relatedness and this New Moon is pushing us to recreate those that shape our lives — especially th relationships we have with ourselves and our own Shakti energy.

The most powerful feminine mysteries involve transforamtion — creation, birth, and death.  These have long been known as “dark mysteries.” They take place in the invisible realms, far beneath the surface of life. In a culture that associates life’s outer surfaces with “light” and “good” and its inner realms, where life is created and regenerated, with “dark” and “bad,” this has created a great deal of fear.   We could just as easily say the dark mysteries — the transformational energies of the dark moon, eclipes, retrograde transitss, and black holes and dark matter too — are the “inner mysteries” of creation.

Whatever we call them, thought, these are the mysteries of creation and transformation. These are the mysteries that can regenerate life in our embattled and besieged world. These are the mysteries that have always belonged to the Feminine. And these are these are the mysteries that are asking us to reclaim them, and with them, our lives and our world.