The Harvest Moon in Aries reached its fullness earlier at 12:49pm ET, Saturday, September 26th, emerging from a sodden three-day stretch in Pisces as prelude.  Conjunct Neptune not two hours prior to exacting, this full moon is shaped by its fleeting alignment with the trident-bearer, only eight months to the day through its epochal movement across the cardinal fire sign.

Staring down the Sun in early Libra, the Aries Moon answers to Mars just past its degree of utmost fall in Cancer, on the doorstep of ingress into Leo.  Feelings and desire dictate as much as thoughtful detachment, with shifting and sometimes contradictory temperaments, as the red planet still guests in the Moon’s home and Luna’s milky plate in Mars’ warrior plod.  It is a mutual reception of sorts, Mars in Cancer like a hot stone dropped in altar water, the Moon in Aries a place of Artemisian poise and ready assertion.

The Aries/Libra axis highlights the inhalation and exhalation of the natural year in the temperate Northern Hemisphere — with the autumnal equinox four days ago came the commencement of the year’s sighing sunset, that midpoint between peak light and peak darkness.  The Libra Sun, ever ruled by Venus, is presently perched in the first face of Scorpio, slowing to a retrograde which begins October 3rd and does not take the fairer benefic back into Libra until October 25th.

As such, the whole of Libra season this year answers to Venus in Scorpio, and the soon changing dignity of Mars whose cloaked yin home she inhabits.

In the first decan of Scorpio, Venus smiles like a jackal, delighted by the earth’s pleasures and the fulfillment that comes with bonded devouring.  Yet there can be an inherent disappointment when nothing in earth’s bouquet of offerings seems to satisfy, when a palette whetted finds insatiability, when the heart-mind subtly guilts itself over any flicker in the select few lights within its den of enclosure.

Be them fixtures upon walls, or the inner lights of those held captive like essence in a medicine bottle… a Full Moon conjunct Neptune begs the question of release; in Aries, elemental fire’s foresight more to do with readiness for the journey than any certainty as to where the path leads.

With the copper-mirrored planet floating amidst that first face of the Scorpion which Coppock called ‘a Jawbone’, ravenous with desire yet often longing for more than the world’s sensory spread can satiate, we see and feel how this celestial moment might hold the paradox of biting down and letting go.

Yet late tomorrow night, Sunday the 27th, Mars enters Leo… a marked change of dignity during the Aries Moon it rules, quickly moving towards the same degree Jupiter occupied when ‘Barbault’s Basket’ perfected in late July — a formation wherein Jupiter in Leo, Uranus in Gemini, Neptune in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius all sat at 4° through their respective signs.

Given that the most potent of this formation was quite arguably the opposition between Jupiter in Leo and Pluto in Aquarius, the fastest and slowest moving of the aforementioned planets no less, we may see similar archetypal themes emerge as Mars moves to oppose Pluto.  The first decan of Leo holds competing faces, voices, visages and masks all vying for center stage, within us and without, while the first decan of Aquarius deals in the beauty and burden of exile, otherness, banishment, that pariah place… the perspective that comes with being perched beyond the city gates.

Reconciling the centermost roles inside us with the swirling technocratic distortions we increasingly live amidst… this will likely be one of the themes as Mars moves to oppose Pluto on October 3rd… the more potent relational and perhaps romantic drama deepening with the Venus/Mars square on October 10th.

Until then… swim well stargazers.


—A.B.