On 26th September, we have a Full Moon in Aries.
Full Moons reveal. They shed light on situations that have remained concealed, including those we might prefer not to see.
This Full Moon falls in the 1st house, or 2nd sign, of the zodiac set for the UK, opposing the Sun in the 7th house, or 8th sign. These positions describe more than a passing mood. To my mind, they expose something fundamental about the relationship between the people, their leaders and the uncertain world taking shape around them.
The Moon, representing the people, is trapped between a retrograde Saturn and a retrograde Neptune. I see the people caught in the birth throes of the new age of intelligence and technology that is struggling to emerge, as represented by the Saturn/Neptune conjunction in March this year.
We are living through its arrival, without yet knowing how we are supposed to live within it. The world the daily news describes is getting louder and more desperate. Yet something is shifting. You can feel it.
In the 1st house, the Moon speaks about the vitality of UK society. People feel unsafe, unheard and dismissed as irrelevant. They are struggling and fearful of their future. Neptune conceals, deceives and confuses. What is happening around them feels obscured, difficult to grasp and harder still to challenge. Saturn, meanwhile, brings the harsh government diktats, whose consequences are all too tangible.
The system has lost the quiet authority of legitimacy. So, it compensates with volume. What is filling the space now? That’s what is important.
In the 2nd sign, this insecurity reaches into their money and assets. The reserves they expected to fall back on in times of need no longer feel dependable. What they thought would protect them is slipping away.
Across the chart, the Sun represents our leaders. In the 7th house, it suggests that they have relinquished their power to others. In the 8th sign, it depicts leaders so burdened by debt that everyday functioning is proving difficult. Mercury, representing communication, opposes Chiron, representing wounding. They cannot tell the people what is really going on.
Yet the consequences of what remains unsaid still have to be lived.
The Libran Sun is ruled by Venus in Scorpio in the 8th house. My reading is stark: our leaders are ruled by money. This is corruption.
For further clues, we must follow the red thread back to Mars. He rules both the Moon in Aries and Venus, the Sun’s ruler. The people and their leaders therefore lead us back to the same struggling planet.
We find Mars at 29 degrees of Cancer. He has no power there. He is drowning in the waters, struggling with his last breaths to reach Leo. He manages this two days later, on 28 September.
The background war talk continues to rumble but the reality is that there is no money to fund it.
But what can the people do while they are struggling to keep their own heads above water?
Alongside Neptune, the Moon connects with the ‘Barbault Basket’ configuration of the outer planets. Saturn is in the mix. His demands and restrictions are already part of people’s reality. But we do not have Jupiter’s assistance at the moment to bring this new age fully into our social structure, with the hope and wisdom that would help us find our place within it.
There is a danger in speaking so readily of a new age that we overlook what it asks of those who must endure its beginnings. Intelligence and technology do not, by themselves, give people meaning, security or a sense of belonging.
What do we have left to turn to? What help can we gain from the outer planets, which inform the collective?
The Moon sits close to Neptune and Saturn, both of whom are, symbolically, rather sick in their retrograde condition. I think we must turn to the ritual of Saturn through the meditation, faith and prayer of Neptune. We have to believe that our participation matters, that through it we can influence the energy.
Ritual requires us to return, to practise and to pay attention. There is responsibility in that, too.
This depiction of our situation reminds me just how awesome astrology really is, not that I needed reminding. Is this because we do not simply live in the universe, but belong to something that is itself alive?
The term is anima mundi, Latin for ‘the soul of the world’: the cosmos understood as a living whole, animated by a soul in which individual lives participate.
One of the great philosophical expressions of this notion appears in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato describes the cosmos as a living being possessing soul and intelligence, with human souls related to that greater cosmic life. ‘World’ here means the whole cosmos, not just the Earth.
Understanding ourselves in relation to that greater whole helps us to both recognise the order of the universe and bringthat order to our own lives. We belong within it. What we do within that relationship matters.
But we should be careful not to turn the world soul into another comforting spiritual expression whose implications we leave unexplored.
A living cosmos contains predation, disease, catastrophe and extinction as well as beauty. We cannot assume that its soul would be gentle, or that its purposes would align with human wishes. Any serious account must make room for this. Nature has never promised us uninterrupted harmony.
Belonging to something alive does not exempt us from its difficulties.
If we belong to a greater living whole, what would it mean to behave as though that relationship mattered?
At this Full Moon, perhaps it means responding to exactly what we are being shown. Saturn may bring harsh and unfair governance, but he also reminds us that we have strength, discipline and the responsibility to put up our own fight. Neptune may obscure our circumstances, yet through prayer and meditation we can seek a deeper relationship with what sustains us.
If astrology becomes only a way of naming what is wrong and waiting for the planets to move, we will leave the work of responding undone. The dates will change while the habits through which we surrender our agency remain.
We may well have to wait until Saturn and Neptune turn direct, on 10 and 12 December respectively, for the movement we hope to see. In the meantime, we can work to relieve their symbolic sickness through our own efforts.
We are part of the world whose condition we are reading.
That asks something of us.