Today’s Ful Moon in Virgo comes to help us ground the Mystery in the mundane

In the midst of one of Earth’s most memorable journeys through Pisces in over a century, Luna comes to ground us.  Each year’s Virgo New Moon—known as the Snow Moon to many native Amerian tribes–pulls us back into the reality of our bodies and the earth in which our lives are rooted.  This year, there is nothing ordinary about the Snow Moon. 

When the Sun and his entourage arrives in Pisces each year and lights up the Full Moon in Virgo, we’re at the end of a cycle.  Pisces is the last sign in the sacred hoop of stars that surround our solar system. It’s the sea into which every other sign empties itself. Virgo is the energy in our rituals of letting go and of preparing ourselves for new birth.

What we’re letting go of can feel like everything and in a way it is. Within the potent waters of Pisces is the essence of all that we’ve experienced journeying through the other 11 territories of the cosmos.  Here we return to Source–gently, perhaps gradually, and inexorably.   In the shifting and deep emotional currents of Piscan memory and longing, part of us is dissolved. We’re being infused with spirit for the rebirth that lies just ahead, with the spring.

A Moon for the Ages 

Neither the Pisces season or its Virgo Full Moon are in any way routine this year. The sky is saturated with the impressionistic nuances, emotional vibrations, and sense memories of a century and a half.  It’s full of wormholes into the collective unconscious.  Here’s why:

1. This is only the second Virgo Full Moon since the great star Regulus entered Virgo, after 2,160 year in Leo.  We’re just beginning to see the energy of Virgo in a much different, deeper, and more powerful light. This is the greatet change in a star of this magnitude in over five millenia, since the astrologers of ancient Persia began to closely observe Regulus. One of the four massive stars known as the “royal stars,” Regulus has long been regarded as one of the guardians of the four corners of the heavens. Now this cosmic guardian illumines the energy of Virgo–the ancient sign of Isis, the Virgin Mary, and Persephone.
2. Just two days ago, the Cosmic Messenger began his retrograde vision quest in Pisces. This is the first of Mercury’s three reconnaissance missions through the water signs in 2013 and in some ways, it’s the most challenging. Astrological tradition considers Mercury to be in “fall” and “detriment” in Pisces. The nuanced Piscean waters of feeling and sense memory are a challenge to the linear, logical way of thinking on which we’ve built the modern world. Music and poetry, not principles, theories, and calculations, are how Mercury in Pisces understands reality.
3. Over half the solar system is helping the Sun light up this part of the sky. Five planets are there—Mercury, Mars, Chiron, and Neptune, as well as the Sun.  And Venus is on her way, arriving shortly after today’s Full Moon.   This is the biggest infusion of Pisces energy we’ve had in years.
4. Among those planets, Neptune is in the second year of his first sojourn in Pisces in 165 years. This is the sign the Cosmic Dreamer rules–in all the cosmos, this is where he’s srongest and most powerful. His last trip to this part of the sky, back in the 1850s, stirred the imaginations and opened the hearts of Americans so deeply that slavery could no longer be tolerated. When Neptune was in the last three minutes of his own sign, the American Civil War began.
5. Another member of the cosmic entourage in Pisces, Chiron, the Sacred Wound that is also Sacred Gift, hasn’t been in the sign of the fishes in 50 years.  The last time he was in this part of the sky, it was the 1960s and the world was changing before our eyes.  It was February 1961 when Chiron last entered Pisces. John F. Kennedy was president of the United States.

Then, as today, much in our world needed the healing touch of Chiron and the open heart of Pisces.   In February 1961, the U.S. tested the first Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile and sent the first EC-135 jet into the air. For the next 30 years, one of these “Doomsday planes” was in the air 24 hours, ever ready to take control of American missiles and bombers were the U.S. Strategic Air Command headquarters to be destroyed.

The same month, the Belgian government was preparing to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, a former Belgian colony. 

By the time Chiron left Pisces in May of 1968, the same cosmic forces that are now activated–Uranus , Neptune, and Pluto–had been at play for nearly seven years, changing our world forever. The Vietnamese peace talks began in May 1968 and a Poor People’s March took place in Washington DC.  In France, a series of student strikes were joined by 11 million workers, nearly bringing about the collapse of the French government and igniting the international student movement around the globe.

The vision questing Messenger is processing all of it, the last 50 years and also the last 165, on a very deep level.  Everything from the Civil War to the Indian Removals, from the rise of industrialism to the first billion-dollar deal, negotiated at the turn of the centuy by J. P. Morgan.  The two World Wars and the Great Depression and the cataclysmic wave of cultural change that swept over the world in the 1960s–all of this is being reassessed by the Heart of the Cosmos–within you and around you. Wherever the sign sign of Pisces falls in your birth chart is where your own personal reassessment of Western culture–at the deepest levels of desire and belief–is occuring. 

Align Your Life: The Cosmic Dance of You 

In a holistic cosmos where every life is a fractal of the Whole, this kind of global reassessment can occur in a very intimate way.  In a univere of indestructible energy, forms may change but the vibrating reality within them is always seeking expansion and freedom, much as leaves in a forest seek light. From the cosmic perspective, today’s Full Moon is all about dancing.  Because it’s a Virgo Full Moon, the energy it brings is that of “a dancing lesson.” 

Virgo is the space where the energies of cosmos and earth are woven together. It’s a vibration of healing and of alignment of the mundane detail with a greater order.  Herbs and gardens, animals, the body and sexuality, the sacred order in all the things of our lives—these are the cornerstones of Virgo reality.  Yoga (literally the yolking together of cosmos and body), tantra, and tai chi–the entire realm of practices linking the body and spirit–are rooted in this ancient ground. 

The long process of training and mastery represented by “a five-year-old child tak[ing] a dancing lesson” is the energy this Virgo Full Moon brings into our lives.  It’s time, the Cosmos is telling us, to find our dancing schools. 

Sounding the Call: Your Future Is Calling

The Sabian symbol for the degree of the sky occupied by the Sun tells us why we’re dancing.  “A girl blowing a bugle” depicts a summons to participate in serving humanity as an evolutionary crisis approaches.  The great astrological pioneer Dane Rudhyar reminds us that this is “a summons to rebirth.”  

It’s not coming a moment too soon.  Mercury began his retrograde to ominous news of toxic leaks underway and on the horizon:  The accelerating melting of the Siberian permafrost.  Radioactive waste is leaking from six underground tank at the most contaminated nuclear site in the U.S.  Photographs of the controversial XL Keystone oil pipeline reveal that it’s literally full of holes.

The message of today’s Virgo Full Moon is clear. Both the Moon’s message and the Sun’s are coming from the young, growing feminine energy within us.  There is a girl within us and she is being prepared and trained at this very moment.   

How do you do that? Take up your healing work. Choose Love, not fear.  Begin with your own toxic emotions and their source in beliefs and practices that are toxic to the earth, the body, and to the energy of the young feminine within you, Integrate your spirituality and your daily life  Find ways to yoke together the realms of body and spirit that our culture has torn apart for millenia. Participate in the evolutionary crisis of our time.  For this is the reason you took birth.