Today’s Full Moon in Leo falls in a degree of the sky whose Sabian symbol tells us is saturated with “the luminescence of dawn.”  If there’s anything we’re ready for as we approach the halfway point of Mercury’s retrograde, it’s dawn.

The energies unfolding within and around this Full Moon tell us that there are some wondrous sights indeed to behold in the light of this dawn.  A trio of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME’s) are cascading from our Sun into the Earth’s atmosphere while the lunar field is still active.   Mercury, at the precise middle of his retrograde vision quest, will conjoin the Sun tomorrow while the Moon is still within her 24-hour window of potency.

In the Heart of the Sun: Purifying the Mind

Mercury, the Cosmic Messenger, is cazimi the Sun less than 24 hours after the Leo Full Moon.

The astrologers of the ancient Arabic world used the word cazimi  to describe a planetary conjunction with our Star of less than a third of a degree — 17 minutes, to be exact. The word cazimi means “in the heart of the Sun.”  Planets that are cazimi the Sun — as Mercury will be tomorrow — undergo a kind of energetic purification in the heart of our Star.  The dross of old programming is burned away in the pure radiance of our Star, renewing the energy within us and around us.

Mercury is the second planet to reach cazimi with the Sun in just over a month.  In January, Venus was similarly reborn at the midpoint of her 40-day vision quest.  Within us, some vital aspect of the capacity to love was reborn as well.  Now, as Mercury cazimis our Star, we become better able to perceive what it is that has changed — and just what it is that Love.  The awareness is amplified by the fact that this cazimi happens during a Leo Full Moon.  The heart is the stellar realm of Leo’s ruler, the Sun.

Cazimi, Breakthrough, and the Power of Love

Mercury will cazimi the Sun at 3:22 p.m. EST on Saturday.  It’s a moment when we can break free of the limitations of our linear mind and the left brain’s need to feel that it’s in control of the Mystery.  The entire day should be one of unfettered perception of higher dimensions of reality for those of us who make space on our calendars and in our hearts to see and hear what the Messenger is communicating to us.

As Mercury and the Sun merge their vibrations on Saturday, they will be at cross purposes with both Pluto, the power planet, and Jupiter, the healer.  For a month now, these two have been confronting each other from across the sky, polarizing our need for power and for growth. As with all oppositions of planetary energy, the choices they’re presenting us with are not the same.  And, as with every opposition, the moment that expands the field is the one when we recognize that  resolution is not a matter of “either / or,”  but of “both / and.”  

The energy pattern of this Full Moon is robust and dynamic.  It’s full of all the challenge we need to expand our awareness.  Saturn forms the tense, stubborn apex of a T-square with both Moon and Sun, pushing us against a wall of implacable resistance.  Yet the closest energetic connections in this sky bring a team of allies to our side.

Allies for Breakthrough at the Leo Full Moon

Mars, the Moon, and the Sun: Linking Will and Desire

With strong, positive — and almost exact — connections to both the Leo Moon and the Aquarius Sun, Mars is generating powerful stores of energy, enthusiasm, and confidence, connecting our wil and our desire.

Eris and Proserpina: Evolving Our Power

In an equally close connection, Proserpina and Eris challenge each other to more powerful and more free.

From her location at the very edge of our star system, Eris carries the unconventional and far-out. It was Mike Brown, the astronomer who discovered this cosmic edge-dweller in 2005, who first noted her resonance with Persephone, the feminine energy that transforms reality as it goes back and forth between visible and invisible realities, cycling through death and rebirth.  Spending part of each of her 542-year orbits around the solar system with Pluto, Eris represents a more cosmic, transcendental version of the transforming feminine energy.

Proserpina and Persephone lie in the main belt of asteroids that cycles between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, within the orbit of Saturn and the boundaries of our three-dimensional reality. Unlike the asteroids Persephone and Proserpina — each of whom carry a part of this profoundly transformative energy — Eris  is free from Saturn’s influence.  Now she pushes at Proserpina to free herself as well.

Proserpina, meanwhile, remains within two degrees of Persephone, her younger, more innocent side, and within two and a half degrees of Psyche, the feminine energy that follows the desires of the heart no matter where it calls.  Over the last few months, these three asteroids have been fusing their energies into a powerful force of transformative feminine energy. The sign where this triple conjunction has waxed and now wanes is the one where Venus has just completed her vision quest, and where Pluto is excavating deep below the surface as he engages in his long, slow life-changing, world-changing square with Uranus.

Medusa at the South Node: The Harvest of Fear

Once the wisest and most powerful serpent goddess of the pre-Hellenic world, Medusa was perceived through the eyes of fear after the shift towards our culture of domination began.

Given this, it’s no surprise to find the goddess asteroid Medusa conjoining the South Node, by only a quarter of a degree, at this Full Moon. Medusa carries the Feminine power we have feared most deeply and demonized most viciously — because it cannot be controlled. Now she reminds us of the price of choosing fear as our primary relationship to reality.  At the South Node, Medusa warns us that to choose fear is to turn way from the future.

Like Persephone, Proserpina, and Psyche, Medusa is a main belt asteroid, lying between the personal planets — the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars — and the social planets, Jupiter and Saturn.  While the personal planets carry the energy we think of when we think of ourselves, it’s the social planets we want to become.  The main belt asteroids are the energy that lies between who we are and who we want to become.  Our relationships with them can be either bridge or barrier.

This Full Moon brings a whole array of energies to help us forge a bridge towards breakthrough.  The most tightly allied of these include:

• Pluto sextiling Chiron –  deep and powerful healing on the way
• Psyche conjoining Persephone – the Heart willing to be transformed
• Hekate conjoining Ceres – companioning us in our grief and despair
• The North Node conjoining Ceres  –  pointing the way to the future in what nurtures us 

 Harnessing the Energies of Love

The energeis unfodling at this Leo Full Moon provide a map that show us how to tap the power ithat we call Love.  The great 20th-century philosopher of the Cosmos, Teilhard de Chardin,  described the importance of this:

“Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love, and  then, for the second time in the history of the world, human beings will have harnessed the power of fire. “

This Leo Full Moon points the way.

Here are the years of the most recent Solar Maximums, including the month when the solar activity was highest: 1936-37 (April 1937); 1946-47 (May 1947); 1957-58 (March 1958); 1968-69 (November 1968); 1979-1980 (December 1979); 1989 (July); 1999-2000 (March 2000)

It’s time to bring both our hearts and our heads together to further our dreams of what Charles Eisenstein reminds us is “the more beautiful world  our hearts know is possible.”  It’s time to begin creating the harmony and beauty we desire.   What this Full Moon reveals is the energy that was created at the New Moon, now freeing itself from the dark as it breaks through the surface, seeking the light.

Saturn-Sun square is one of those reality checks we get periodically. Saturn in Scorpio wants to remind the Sun in Aquarius that lasting change often takes time.