Hey everyone! I’m back!
Over a year ago I abruptly stopped publishing this newsletter. I was dealing with some chronic health stuff at the time, including brain inflammation brought on by a head injury, which was making writing difficult.
Since then, my health has improved significantly and I’ve grown in my practice as an astrologer, continuing my study and doing readings for clients.
I’ve decided to experiment with bringing this newsletter back. I can’t promise any level of consistency of output and I make no promises as to how long I’ll keep this project up or whether I will post beyond today, but I had the thought of beginning modestly with a post on this week’s New Moon in Virgo, which will go exact this Monday, September 2 at 9:55 pm Eastern Time.
New Moons are good for initiating things, or at least for setting our sights toward what we want to bring about in the time ahead.
This New Moon will happen in Virgo, which (using the whole-sign house system) is my 10th house of career and public roles. In my chart, the ruler of my 10th house (Mercury) is in Scorpio, which is the 3rd derived house from Virgo, suggesting to me that part of my public-facing life involves writing.
So here we are.
The Energetic Pattern of the Lunation Cycle
New Moons are generally thought of as seed moments and times for setting intentions, intentions that can be guided by looking at the astrological weather at the time of the New Moon.
When the Sun and Moon come together at the time of the New Moon and begin a new lunation cycle, the Moon is invisible and dark. This period is reflective and forward looking, but not particularly high energy.
Much like the battery percentage icon on your phone, the visual appearance of the Moon can indicate periods moving from low energy (with the dark and crescent periods being ones of low energy) to high energy (with the half, gibbous, and full periods being ones of higher energy).
As the Moon grows in size, our energy to carry out intentions grows and our intentions become more concrete, and we can think of the waxing of the Moon as a period where our batteries fill up.
But this New Moon is unusual in that it is the last New Moon before eclipse season begins. After this week, we enter into eclipse season, and eclipse seasons don’t follow the predictable energetic pattern, and I often feel that the entirety of eclipse season, lasting about a month or so, can have this quality of wired indeterminateness. Eclipse season can often feel like a month’s long caffeine high, where things are changing rapidly and the normal rules of the game don’t apply and one has to improvise, or simply let Jesus take the wheel.
Chaos reigns and we are simply going to have to roll with it. (I believe it was Diana Rose Harper, who said on The Astrology Podcast that eclipses are chaotic neutral.)
Today a friend messaged me to bear this very dynamic in mind. With this New Moon, it’s “a good time to set an intention for something to be transformed,” but to “then let the coming chaos take hold of that.”
So when we think about our intentions during this New Moon, let’s understand that significant shifts are in store with regard to whatever we wish to manifest, but that they will not follow a steady, straightforward, or predictable pattern.
While eclipse season often doesn’t lead to the most immediately dramatic life-altering of changes (though it sometimes can), the changes signified by eclipses are significant and the houses in which eclipses land indicate shifts that occur during the roughly 18-month period while the nodes are in a given axis. Right now we are wrapping up a period where the nodes are in the Libra-Aries axis and about to move into Virgo-Pisces early next year. The fact that we are straddling the line between the two axes is reflected by the fact that this upcoming eclipse season brings us a North Node eclipse in Pisces and a South Node eclipse in Libra.
I generally find that eclipse season is a time where the rules of the game and the agenda by which we conduct ourselves undergo unalterable shifts, whether big or small. When we go through the eclipse portal, the old rules no longer apply and we need to start playing by different ones.
So again, we can look at the themes of this upcoming New Moon and wish to direct our intentions toward certain ends, but also recognize that we will be entering a timespan when whatever we wish to initiate or transform is going to enter a period of wild indeterminacy, and with this being the final New Moon in Virgo that isn’t an eclipse (the lunar nodes will move into the Virgo-Pisces axis early next year), whatever we wish to manifest in our Virgo house is going to look radically and unpredictably different two years from now when the South Node finishes its time in Virgo.
Preparing for the Nodal Shift
Again, this week’s upcoming New Moon in Virgo will be the final lunation to happen in Virgo for a couple of years that isn’t an eclipse. At the beginning of next year, the lunar nodes will move into the Virgo-Pisces axis and this part of our chart will be thoroughly worked over.
Even though the nodes are still in the Libra-Aries axis, September’s lunar eclipse will occur in Pisces. This eclipse will be at 25° Pisces and not too far from the North Node, which will be in early Aries at the time of the eclipse. Eclipses happen when there’s a New or Full Moon within 15° of the nodes, so while the North Node will still be in Aries, the Full Moon in Pisces will happen close enough to the North Node for there to be a lunar eclipse.
So again, this eclipse season brings us one eclipse in Pisces on September 17 (foreshadowing the roughly 18-month period when the nodes will be in the Virgo-Pisces axis) and one in Libra on October 2 (marking the winding down of the nodes being in the Libra-Aries axis).
There is thus a liminality to this period, with the New Moon in Virgo this week offering us a preview of transformations to come. We can welcome things into our life pertaining to our Virgo house, but we can recognize that we are due for an overhaul of that house in 2025 and 2026, with the South Node in Virgo initiating a release and clearing out as it pertains to the themes of that house. If we wish to welcome something new into our lives which pertains to the Virgo house in our chart, then we may have to let go of or sacrifice something first to clear the way for that which is to come. Such a clearing is the work of the South Node.
If you look at your rising sign, you can look to the whole-sign house in which Virgo lands in your chart to discern the themes of this New Moon:
Aries rising — Virgo is your 6th house — illness, injury, misfortune, health routines, toil, perseverance
Taurus rising — Virgo is your 5th house — pleasure, creativity, children
Gemini rising — Virgo is your 4th house — home, family, parents, roots, land
Cancer rising — Virgo is your 3rd house — communication, siblings and friends who are like siblings, local environment
Leo rising — Virgo is your 2nd house — resources, finances, people and things that support you
Virgo rising — Virgo is your 1st house — self, body, appearance, personality
Libra rising — Virgo is your 12th house — retreat, seclusion, self-undoing
Scorpio rising — Virgo is your 11th house — friends, social and professional networks, community, hopes and aspirations and the connections that facilitate their fulfillment
Sagittarius rising — Virgo is your 10th house — career and public life, “what you do”
Capricorn rising — Virgo is your 9th house — worldview, beliefs, higher education, higher powers, the law, long-distance travel
Aquarius rising — Virgo is your 8th house — shared resources, debt, things inherited or owed, death and taxes
Pisces rising — Virgo is your 7th house — marriage, partnership, one-on-one relationships, other people
The Astrological Weather
This New Moon carries an element of forward momentum in that it is ruled by a newly direct Mercury that is gaining speed, but still a Mercury that is only moving a fraction of its average speed, having only moved a couple of degrees since stationing direct last week on Wednesday.
At the time of the New Moon, Mercury is in Leo, which is the 12th derived house from Virgo, so this New Moon will have a 12th house flavor. The 12th house deals with themes of seclusion, of being cloistered or shut away, or of being driven off track. This can feel isolating and harsh, but it can also be a place of reflection and behind-the-scenes labor.
For example, if you are Taurus rising, this New Moon will happen in your 5th house of creativity. Perhaps what you are initiating with this New Moon is still gestating and the labor that you are putting in for it is private in nature.
Or if you are Sag rising like me, this New Moon is speaking to your career or public roles, but you may feel like whatever is brewing is still happening behind the scenes, or that whatever you are seeking to achieve may be in response to a feeling of having been driven off track in life, perhaps due to self-defeating patterns.
Or let’s say you are Aries rising. This New Moon will happen in your 6th house. Maybe there is some injury or illness that you are needing to heal from, or something you are in the midst of that will require hard work and perseverance. Maybe this is something that is hidden from view, that isn’t public knowledge, but that you are tending to in private.
So look to the whole-sign house in which this New Moon lands for you and understand that the themes that this New Moon brings up for you will figure heavily in the next couple years as the lunar nodes move through the Virgo-Pisces axis. This New Moon will be opposite Saturn, suggesting that whatever story being told by this New Moon will unfold through time. This is reinforced by the fact that whatever happens while the South Node is in Virgo in 2025 and 2026 will unfold through time and that this will occur in ways that are utterly unpredictable.
With Mercury having just come off its retrograde and slowly picking up speed, it may feel like you are able to move forward after some degree of setback or after having to do some backtracking, but that you are only now beginning to gain momentum, but that you are still a way’s away from gaining full speed. But with this New Moon opposing Saturn in Pisces, we may feel that while we are moving forward, there is still something blocking our path. Don’t expect instant gratification.
Now Mercury will be square to Uranus at the time of the New Moon, so there is a sense that a sudden or unexpected insight or shift in perspective could be a force for reorientation. There might be a yearning for freedom from the Saturnian shackles of the present, and while the release from present frustrations might not be immediate, we can shift our outlook in a way that can signal the liberation that will emerge through time. With Uranus having just stationed retrograde the day prior to the New Moon and still at the same degree and minute of its retrograde station, we could be feeling the Uranian yearning to break free to be quite strong, as planets that are stationing can be quite loud.
On a collective level, note that the last two retrograde stations of Uranus have coincided, respectively, with the Biden administration announcing its student loan forgiveness program in 2022 (which was subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court) and, in 2023, its first list of medications subject to price negotiations with Medicare per the Inflation Reduction Act. For me this suggests the domestication of radical demands through policies that move the needle but that nevertheless fall short of the kind of transformative vision represented by Uranus. And in the case of the student loan forgiveness program, we notice the ways in which the administration’s attempts at forgiveness have been subject to numerous revisions and reversals.
Speaking of things on the collective level, if we look at the chart of the New Moon, we see that Pluto just retrograded back into Capricorn for the last time, something that also happened on Sunday, the same day as Uranus’ retrograde station. Pluto has been in Capricorn since 2008, which revealed the underbelly and horror of systems of power, financialization, and oligarchy. This period was inaugurated with the financial crisis of 2008 and the decade and a half that followed has been marked by a collective contention with systems of power. Pluto will leave Capricorn for the final time in our lifetimes on November 19, so there is an indication that this upcoming election will speak to all these themes and will in many ways demarcate the transition from one Plutonian era to the next.
This New Moon will occur in the second decan of Virgo. The second decan of Virgo is associated with the Nine of Pentacles tarot card. This decan is both Venusian and Saturnian in character and speaks to the beauty and perfection that is cultivated through time. This decan is about behind-the-scenes labors that are hidden in the finished product. People often trash talk Virgo for being too particular and fastidious, but celebrate the final product. But we know that we cannot have one without the other. It is through editing and refinement that things are made beautiful and nothing emerges fully formed. The process is necessary, even if it remains unappreciated. This New Moon is an invitation to appreciate the process.
With the New Moon happening in opposition to Saturn, there is a sense that whatever we want will not occur without patience and perseverance. Like the grapes in the Waite-Smith version of the Nine of Pentacles, the fruits for which we yearn are bitter until ripe. And with the 12th house derived theme of this New Moon, we are called to look at what happens away from the gaze of others to generate that which emerges when we are eventually called to step outside of the shadows. The 12th house is where Saturn rejoices because it is a place of seclusion and separation.
With Saturn being in the mutable water sign of Pisces since March of last year, we have been seeing Saturn work as a disciplining force on planets transiting through the mutable signs, which we most recently have been experiencing with Mars and Jupiter’s transits through Gemini and Venus’ transit through Virgo. The mutable earth sign of Virgo has a reputation for perfectionism, and while it’s important to give the meticulousness of Virgo its due and respect its role in the creation of a final product, one thing about Saturn’s transit through Pisces is that it is asking us whether this perfectionism is ultimately sustainable, productive, and healthy.
If Saturn is about limits, discipline, and time, then being in the sign opposite Virgo, the planet of “no” and of frustration demands that we understand the limits of perfectionism, to recognize that while the act of refining something in itself can be an important discipline, there is a need to rein in and discipline perfectionism, to show discipline and discernment in recognizing when something is “good enough,” and to understand that attending to every minute detail, while it has its virtues, can slow things down and wear on us through time. We get nowhere when we get bogged down by the details and demand absolute thoroughness. As someone with a Virgo stellium, this has been one of the lessons for me during Saturn’s time in Pisces.
Oppositions are about the tension between opposites. Sometimes we can synthesize these opposites in dialectical fashion and other times we have to simply hold that tension, perhaps privileging one side on one occasion and privileging the other on another. So we are invited to hold this tension between a Virgoan thoroughness that enables beauty and perfection to emerge, but to also recognize that the quest for perfection can make us lose sight of the larger picture.
With Mercury being trine Chiron at the time of the New Moon, we may gain insight into which our own perfectionism is itself rooted in our wounds and traumas and in a sense that we don’t quite measure up and are not enough. By recognizing when things are “good enough,” we can recognize that we ourselves are enough and not defined by what we produce, even if we strive to generate abundance within our own lives.
While the middle ten degrees of Virgo are associated with the Nine of Pentacles, the major arcana card that corresponds to the entirety of Virgo is the Hermit. The lamp held by the figure in the image makes me think of the Mercurial nature of Virgo, a sign that is good at shining a light on all the small details in order to make something better. There is often a tendency with Virgo to not work well in groups because there’s a sense that everyone else is gonna fuck things up due to a lack of acuity and care when it comes to the details, a sense that it’s easier to do everything oneself than to deal with others’ incompetence.
The Hermit card makes me think of the ancient meaning of virginity, which was less about sexual purity and more about belonging to oneself. And there is often this sense of self-sufficiency with Virgo, and the Nine of Pentacles often evokes the image of a woman who is independent. It makes me think of how the word ‘spinster’ originally referred to women who made a living through spinning yarn and subsequently came to refer to women who are unmarried.
With Saturn in the connective sign of Pisces, it invites us to think about the ways in which connection is a discipline, particularly for those of us who tend to keep others at a distance. The Moon in the second decan of Virgo conveys a sense of emotional self-reliance. The Moon in astrology variously stands for our emotions, the body, and the relational/environmental matrix in which we are embedded. The Moon is often about the things in which we find comfort, but the Moon in Virgo has a princess-and-the-pea or Goldilocks quality, where things have to be “just right” in order for us to be comfortable, where the smallest thing that is off might feel like a huge irritation. The opposition between the Moon in Virgo and Saturn in Pisces might ask us to ease into the discomfort that comes from things being not quite what we want them to be: when we expect people or things to be perfect or exactly what we want them to be, we miss the opportunity for connection, to enjoy the fruits of our labor, or to simply unwind with things as they are.
At the time of the New Moon, Mars is at the final degrees of Gemini. The time with Mars in Gemini has been difficult, particularly in mid to late August. Mars conjoined Jupiter in the first half of the month, which might have found us wanting to accelerate our drive toward expansion, but Saturn in Pisces put the brakes on that, forcing us to deal with delays and the sense that what we want will come in its own time. With Mars now at the final degrees of Gemini, it is in a square to Neptune, which may give us the sense that our energies are being dispersed in multiple directions. This could feel dynamic, but unfocused. I wouldn’t expect this to be a time where the direction of our energies feels clear or singular: we may have to plant multiple seeds and trust that with our hands in different pots that something useful will emerge.
Mars moves into Cancer this week, which is the sign of Mars’ fall. Mars in Gemini loves a good argument, and Mars’ time in Gemini saw us getting into all kinds of political debates, and with Mars copresent with Jupiter in Gemini, there was perhaps a high-minded, but also braggedocious quality to our stances. Saturn in Pisces might have pointed us to the ways in which we are nevertheless connected to a larger humanity which may or may not agree with us, which can feel frustrating, but also help us remain unattached to our own perspective.
The brashness of Mars isn’t going to be given much respect in Cancer and Mars might have to work in unconventional ways to get what it wants in this cardinal water sign. Instead of tackling things head-on, it may have to come at things from the side, crab-walking its way to where it needs to be. Mars in watery Cancer is prone to crying when angry and may be driven to fight reluctantly out of a desire to protect and nurture that which is held dear. Where Mars in Gemini will fuck around simply to find out, Mars in Cancer doesn’t take things so lightly and will enter the fray, not out of the thrill of the fight, but out of a desire to bring into being a state where life can flourish. Cancer would love things to be soft and gentle all the time, to be nestled within cocoons of care, but when those things are compromised we are moved to advocate fiercely for what matters. Cancer can become quite irritable when an equilibrium is disrupted or when forced to leave the house, but when that which we most treasure is threatened, we have no choice but to fight.
Finally, at the time of the New Moon, Venus will be on the South Node in Libra, perhaps offering us a preview of the eclipse that will happen next month. The South Node is about clearing and emptying things out. As a Sag rising person, Libra lands in my 11th whole-sign house, so there has been a sense during this period with the South Node in Libra where I’ve felt a scarcity in terms of community and social connection, due in large part to being separated geographically from my friends. Venus is empowered in Libra due to the fact that Libra is one of Venus’ home signs, but the South Node has a tendency to turn the volume down on whatever it touches, so Venusian themes of beauty and connection may feel more subdued or lacking in abundance, or in simple need of being revamped, of being emptied out to be refilled.
Alright, that’s it. Again, I make no promises that I will make a habit of posting here, but with this long holiday weekend, I thought I’d give it a shot. Please feel free to leave a comment or share. I have my books open for readings this fall, so if you’d like a reading please inquire at astronotesnewsletter@gmail.com.
That’s it for now. Be well, everyone!
I have been working on this poem for the past few days, trying to get the details right:
War and Peace
Rape, angry savagery
these have been weapons of war
since war began
since we began
Send out young men with everything
to prove
in a world where masculinity
means obdurate strength to crush all
labeled enemy, no mercy, no soft sensibilities.
Mere politics can't abolish such brutality.
Leaders, chosen or proclaimed, are caught up
in their social norms. Only cultural shift
will move human behavior to a place of greater sanity,
those better lives we visualize to labor toward.
Hate, meant as protection against pain of betrayal,
is too potent, too important an emotion
to harbor wholesale.
Hate ought be intimate, one to one,
based on true harm.
We, each and every of us, are blessed
with vital roles,
to discover, invent, conjure, devise
our strategies to become, each and all,
imbued with
kindness, compassion, the enlightened
self-interest of win/win/win.
This humane grace we may attain,
as any future mankind might plan, encourage,
carry through,
that each and every me and you
has a hand in, our literal skin in,
shareholders all.
The price of war is abhorrent.
Will you choose to be wise,
to open your ongoing lives
to peace?
So nice to see you back, Natty, and so nice to know you’re doing well! Thanks for the super informative piece on this heralding New Moon - my natal Moon is in Virgo and you provided some valuable perspective on how to approach and work with eclipse season during a personally heightened and critically important autumn and onward. Greatly appreciated!