Dear Friend and Reader:

It's a pleasure to be able to write about a solar-lunar event that is not an eclipse, or something sitting on the Aries Point. That has been the story behind every New Moon or Full Moon so far this summer. With the Leo New Moon of Aug. 20, we close the book on those events and move on to new territory.

A lion in Namibia. Photo: Wikipedia.

This New Moon, placed at 27+ Leo, happens in the last few days before the Sun ingresses Virgo and (in the Northern Hemisphere) the summer season begins to disseminate into the autumn. This is one of the most palpable sign changes of the Sun that I've ever felt; sometimes it seems as if the Sun actually appears different between its time in Leo and its time in Virgo. The rays seem softer, almost like they are coming through a wicker screen some days.

We're not quite there yet. First we have the Sun-Moon conjunction, or the Leo New Moon. This is a pretty interesting piece of astrological work: the conjunction is opposite to within one degree where the Jupiter-Chiron-Neptune conjunction happened this past spring. All those planets are now retrograde, and the conjunction has fanned out a few degrees earlier. Over the weekend the Sun opposed each of them, one at a time. The New Moon later in the week reminds us of their influence when we combine them into one focused ray of light.

Here, we come to the passage in the story about where the individual life meets the collective life. Leo is a truly holistic kind of individualism. It's not the self-focused kind that we see in Aries and it's not the unworldly kind that we see in Sagittarius. Leo's 'planet' is the Sun, the ringmaster of the many-ringed circus of the solar system and of the psyche. The Aquarius triple conjunction is about taking our awareness to a new level of collective reality just like Leo takes a holistic view of individualism; that the individual contains the whole.

The key to the triple conjunction is Chiron, who in Aquarius represents the awareness that we all carry a tribal wound; the expectation of being outcast; the sense that we don't fit in. Jupiter and Neptune are here to teach us that we can heal that. There are two levels, at least: Jupiter representing the need for individuals to get to know how big the world is, and how diverse, and learn how much everyone has in common, despite this.

Neptune for its part represents the need for us to wake up spiritually. I use that word carefully, but I know what I mean. I mean wake up, at all. I mean wake up to the fact that this dimension is not all there is, and to the truth of how deluded most people are; and how little we bother to apply what we know -- and how much we need to. Chiron for its part is acting on both Jupiter and Neptune: in the first instance, to bring what is distant and wise and exotic to the immediate environment; and with Neptune to wake up from our delusion that we take any comfort at all in denial or greed.

Cats in window, Ile St Louis. Photo by Eric Francis.

Now we have a New Moon in Leo looking right at this whole story. We have the Sun and the Moon in a self-aware place, considering this much larger situation. This is the picture of an individual deciding it's time to come into balance and see where we actually fit into this process. The New Moon emphasizes the need to align the masculine and the feminine attributes of consciousness and actually think with both halves of our brain.

Apropos of male and female inner archetypes, I will leave you with one image from the chart that might reveal something about this. Both Venus and Mars are relating to the planet Uranus, though in radically different ways. This week we get Mars in Gemini square Uranus in Pisces. This sounds like dualism colliding with itself and we realize that dualism is a tool or a quality that has a purpose and when that purpose is done we need to shift our perception to a unified level of consciousness -- though as something resembling a conscious choice or action.

Venus in Cancer is also trine Uranus in Pisces. The suggestion here is that the feminine energy can simply flow, when it's allowed to. It's not about doing but merely allowing. This is something we rarely facilitate; in our society we put all kinds of regulations on the experience of feminine emotions, passions, feelings and sentiments -- in both women and men. We have come a long way toward teaching everyone that women are merely display items, not the actual human experience.

Looked at one way the setup involving the Leo New Moon is about catching a glimpse of how out of whack we are emotionally, and admitting the need to hold that awareness long enough for healing to come -- or even to begin. And to state it again, much of that healing involves thinking with both sides of our brains; feeling with both sides of our bodies; and to the best extent we can, standing in the viewpoint of the people we share intimacy or space with.

Yours & truly,