Sagittarius New Moon Solar Eclipse
We are experiencing a powerful solar eclipse over the new moon in Sagittarius, which occurs on Sat 4th Dec at 7.42am UK time. It is an especially intense time, a crisis of meaning and spiritual direction. There is a need to set our course for the future in a way that makes intuitive sense, staying alert to the vested interests that are seeking to take over the meta-narrative of our lives. The Sun and Moon are conjunct Mercury, inconjunct Uranus and sextile Saturn, forming what is sometimes known as a learning triangle, where we are stretched in our thinking, and challenged to integrate new perspectives and ways of doing things. Those two planets, Uranus & Saturn, are in the process of forming their third exact square aspect this year. This culminates at Christmas, and raises the stakes for the technocratic forces that seek to sever our connection with traditional forms of embodied sense-making; but it should also rouse the counter-movement to rebel against the imposition of that authority. This is the final eclipse season on the Gemini/Sagittarius polarity, a series which began in November last year. And the energy set in motion by this eclipse will reverberate until the next eclipse season (on the Taurus/Scorpio axis) in April 2022.
When the Sun and Moon align in the mutable fire sign of Sagittarius, our spiritual or religious instincts are awakened in our quest for a higher sense of purpose. Our vision seeks to expand far and wide, the archer’s fiery arrow trained on what lies beyond the visible horizon. We need to know not just what we are doing, but why we are doing it, and what is the meaning behind it. The need for meaning is, I would argue, is as fundamental to human life, as our need for nourishment and security. Without it we are lost, aimless, in a kind of void. We need to be able to put our faith in something greater than the mundane rituals of our everyday lives, and Sagittarius (along with its ruling planet Jupiter) holds the astrological energy for this. With Jupiter having been in Aquarius for almost a year now, a great deal of hope is invested in the idea that we ‘are all in it together’, and that we must come together in some great community effort that means us being ever more connected through technology.
An eclipse renders us vulnerable to the shadow aspect of the sign in which it falls, and in Sagittarius that opens the door to fundamentalist beliefs, blind faith, unthinking, unquestioning conviction. And these days it is not so much the religious institutions of Christianity that hold sway, but the Church of Science, binding us as it does to a belief in secular materialism. This belief system is, of course, is propped up by the billionaires that sponsor it. And money itself achieves an ultimate bottom-line ‘value’ within such a paradigm of materialist science, and freed from the traditional institutions and value systems that once regulated it, it seems that everything is for sale. When Nietzsche declared that ‘God is dead’, he did not celebrate the fact, for he foresaw the devastation that would ensue as the secular institutions and their inevitably corrupt human representatives would come to stand in place of God and assume the same overarching power. When such an influential technocrat as Anthony Fauci declares: “I am the science” (as he did in a recent interview), you know that we have reached that point.
Every sign is part of a polar axis, necessarily balanced by its opposite, and it is the role of Gemini, the counterpoint to Sagittarius, to keep alive our capacity for intelligent questioning, dialogue and investigation. Gemini, and Mercury, provide us with the means to access information and query it, while Sagittarius, and Jupiter make meaning of it, and determine its spiritual value. Many people quite rightly make the distinction between spirituality and religion, spirituality involving some form of personal spiritual dialogue with the divine, unbound from the dogmatic aspect of religion. It is similar, I think, with science, which in its true form is always a process of questioning and enquiry, a far cry from the religiosity that has come to characterise it now; where the science is apparently settled and dogmatically imposed upon society as law. This is science as tyranny and it seems to be the most obvious current manifestation of the Sagittarian shadow.
Image by Dan Goodfellow
So let us remember that Sagittarius is a sign of freedom and exploration, through which we seek space, new vistas, a wider perspective on ourselves and the world. It is the sign that inspires us to travel, both physically and through the power of the mind. It is a sign that can liberate us from a purely materialistic perspective, it gives us a glimpse of the divine, and reminds us that we are not bound purely by the physical aspect of our existence. Sagittarius brings forth the medicine of hope, faith and the possibility of what could be. And it is a leap of faith that we need right now if we are conceive a better future for ourselves and for the generations to come.
My Sagittarius mantra runs: “I know the way, I am guided by the stars, and I trust that my aim is true.”