Both Eyes Open in the Dark of Night: New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer
New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer | July 12, 2018
20 degrees | 7:48pm PST
Thursday night’s New Moon Solar Eclipse begins the intense season of shadowy luminaries. The three eclipses to come over the course of the month plunge us into soul-and-spirit work. Eclipse Season is never a breeze. You’re likely to see parts of yourself that are harder to look at and work with, and you may see them come up for the people around you too. There’s a dark, subterranean work trying to take place whether you participate consciously or not. If you want to do it well, this strange work demands the ego surrender its power so you can train both eyes and ears on the healing project at hand, under an inky sky that speaks the language of personal mythology and inner monsters. It offers the opportunity to rewrite stories from far below the ground, up.
We’re looking for the faint motion of the pulse, listening for the archetypal river of blood that vivifies us. How alive is our creativity? Do we still still have access to waters of inspiration? Remember that acts of creativity extend far beyond the arts and include loving yourself fully, loving others fully, participating in communities, and beyond. It includes the acts that ground us into the present moment with healthy, organic aliveness, and ultimately propel us into a more integrated reality. Eclipse season is the reality check on these sensitive issues.
Tomorrow’s New Moon Cancer is just barely an eclipse. The Sun will see only a sliver of Luna’s shadow, and yet Pluto, the gatekeeper of the underworld, gazes grimly across the zodiac in exact opposition to the luminaries as they conjoin in Cancer’s tender, safety-seeking waters.
Cancer’s fourth house orientation toward the inner life and the the security to process personal experience is disrupted by this gaze, if not directly violated. Shadows and darkness will creep into the places we may feel least comfortable encountering them. In a vessel out at sea, our only protection from what lurks below, we fall prey to the acrid sensation that whatever it is down there is coming for the boat, and could cuff us down into the deep until our lungs fill with water.
In the end, if we find ourselves in the water we swim or sink. Only fate decides how far we are from shore, or what friends may come across with the resources to help us out of the sea. Pluto shows the ego precisely where it’s not in control, where you can and can’t be protected, where you have and haven’t protected yourself already. Where you hurt and can be healed.
Downloading this kind of psychological information can feel harsh in conjunction with the modern pace of life, but the sky offers some balm during this dark lunation. It's held in the arms of two gentle Grand Trines: an earth trine with Saturn in Capricorn, Venus in Virgo, and Uranus in Taurus, and a water trine with Sun/Moon in Cancer, Jupiter in Scorpio, and Neptune in Pisces. An additional light in the midst of a stygian sky is Jupiter’s recent direct station in Scorpio. Receptive to Mars, who is still off on the South Node loudly purging all toxins from our warrior bodies, Jupiter Direct aids us in cultivating flexibility, and faith that this journey through the caverns will reveal the jewels we probably have yet to see.
Ultimately we’re being called to cooperate with our tenderest desires, and those can be the most terrifying. But they’re the ones that help direct the soul back home, and if Pluto has anywhere it wants the soul to go, it’s home. If we can look these often deeply buried emotional realities in the face, invaluable experience is been gained, as is the capacity to create or feed that hybrid part of the self that knows both the underworld and how to engage with the surface world, remaining true to both.
This multivalent aspect of the self that wants to be conceived or nourished is the aspect that unlocks the authentic, cyclical ebb and flow nature of human creativity. Undamming this current at the level of the individual inner life is the only path toward collective human liberation/harmony. The inner work is not indulgent, it’s necessary. Whatever steps the path toward a fully emancipated creative self requires, take them. This could mean boldly beginning something new, it could mean boldly releasing something that’s hindered the flow. Wherever this takes you, it may look very different than where you had planned to go. Lay low enough to go for the ride.
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This summer’s Eclipse season is heavily oriented around themes of personal authenticity and collective enfranchisement. Thursday’s Cancerian waters culminate in a wildly intense Lunar Eclipse in Aquarius in late July, followed by a New Moon Solar Eclipse in Leo in August. Pluto, Mars, Uranus, and Mercury Retrograde will all have lead roles throughout the season: very few of us will escape unscathed by the demons that have been previously shrouded in the mysterious night of the underworld. But understanding what has lurked there will give us stronger voices. Outer life will have to adapt to the realities we uncover, but remember that much is inflamed in the season of eclipses, and that changes don’t have to be made rapidly. As the dragons wake, get to know them. Take space for the vision quests of whatever scope you deem necessary.
We're working on our night vision, learning to walk through the cryptic hours of darkness and remain lucid, at ease with the deepest of mysteries, healing ourselves as the path shows fit.