FULL MOON, July 1, 10:20pm EDT at 10 Cancer-CAPRICORN
Image: Shiva, Lord of the Dance. Photo by author from the Musee Guimet in Paris, housing one of the largest collections of Asian art outside Asia.
What a way to start a new month! Under the spotlight of this Plutonian Full Moon, secret dealings and secret feelings are exposed, with globe and life-altering impact to play out over the next two weeks. In the U.S., this Full Moon is a power punch lead-up to the national birthday. The waning, but still potent Pluto-Uranus square continues to push collective change forward, as we have seen with recent landmark decisions by Ireland and the U.S. Supreme Court to honor same-sex marriage. The ecological health agenda has received the blessing of the Pope, who recently declared it a sin to damage the environment.
The Earth is rocking and rolling, demonstrating the power of Nature with extreme weather across the planet, rearranging our lives in the process. How are you redesigning the basics of your life to indicate that you are responding to this cosmic necessity? Cleaning out any closets, having a garage sale, taking charge of any outstanding project that needs fixing—all are simple yet effective ways to demonstrate your cooperation. Make best use of what you have. If you can’t use it, give it to someone who can. “Saving for a rainy day” often piles up a lot of clutter. Consider the clutter in your inner world as well. Our work is clearly cut out for us.
NEW HORIZONS ARRIVING AT PLUTO
I’m writing most of this edition of Cosmic News as a kind of HOMAGE TO PLUTO, the transformational planet conjunct this Full Moon and further activated by opposing Mars, which flanks the Sun. This Full Moon cycle erupts with hot lava, as do our emotions and the news. Astrologer Simone Butler says it pithily at www.AstroAlchemy.com:
“There’s no doubt that this is a potentially divisive and incendiary Full Moon. The Moon in strict Capricorn joins volcanic Pluto as they oppose the Sun and militant Mars in patriotic, emotional Cancer. Cancer and Capricorn represent mother and father in the horoscope; they hold sway over family and traditions, so this Full Moon is bound to inflame deep-seated emotional issues.”
If you are a Pluto-lover (you know if you are), mark your calendar for the closest approach of the NEW HORIZONS SPACECRAFT to Pluto on July 14—if it can find the tiny planet!! Since it was discovered in 1930, we haven’t yet experienced even half of Pluto’s 248-year orbit, so its exact path is not confidently mapped. A “phone call” to New Horizons takes 4.5 hours, which makes it more challenging for NASA to drive the thing. This mini-vehicle has taken 10 years to cover the 3 billion miles to the remote, as yet unvisited planet. Pluto is rather like an icy golf ball, with its large moon, Charon, and four smaller moons: Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos. All these names are familiar from the myth of Pluto, God of the Underworld. The unusual craft, the smallest ever sent so far, required an inventive miniature instrument package with remote sensing specialties, named LORI, Alice, Ralph and Rex, PEPPSI and SWAP. My favorite is the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, named for the 10-year-old English girl who suggested the planet’s name.
Pluto’s discoverer, self-taught Kansas farm boy Clyde Tombaugh, wrote in 1980,
“The discovery of Pluto was due to a remarkable chain of accidental events spanning several decades, decreed by fate…Its status as an object is engulfed in mystery. Everything about Pluto was unexpected.”
We’ll soon find out more. Fingers crossed. So far, so good.
In the meantime we tune into the depths of this Full Moon, pulling us in and further in. Pluto, also called Hades, is the god of death, but also of rebirth and revitalization. In Hindu myth, Shiva is the Plutonian Lord of the Dance, dancing the creation into being and destroying it, then creating it yet again in a grand recycling. In Haitian Voudoun, the Pluto equivalent is Ghede, according to Mayan Deren in “Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti”:
“dark figure which attends the meeting of the quick and the dead. This is the loa [god] who, repository of all the knowledge of the dead, is wise beyond all others. And if the souls of the dead enter the depths by the passage of which Ghede is the guardian, the…life forces emerge from that same depth by that same road. Hence is the Lord of Life as well as of Death.”
Pluto is not the realm of “afterlife,” but the inner life, a deep and vital undercurrent that contains the seeds of our death, as well as the riches of our essential Self and soul relationship to divinity. Pluto the planet represents the hidden aspect of our conscious world. The forces of Pluto represent the invisible substratum underlying our daily lives, the inner psychic processes that motivate our conscious purpose. They represent our inner wealth and power, the destiny toward which we are always directed by this power from within. Depth Psychologist James Hillman’s “The Dream and the Underworld” is an excellent handbook of Pluto. He writes about the psychological process of transformation, of death and rebirth, through dreams, images, reflection, intuition and feelings that “twist life into psyche,” revealing the hidden realities that move our outer lives.
“By the call to Hades I am referring to the sense of purpose that enters whenever we talk about soul. What does it want? What is it trying to say (in this dream, this symptom, experience, problem)? Where is my fate or individuation process going? If we stare these questions in the face, of course we know where our individuation process is going—to death. This unknowable goal is the one absolute sure event of the human condition. Hades is the unseen one and yet absolutely present.”
Often when Pluto is active, we look death in the face at some level. Our life force is pulled deep down within to experience a profound and powerful process of transformation, severing the ego’s hold on the world as we hover precariously on some unknown threshold. In the dark light of this invisible realm our vision penetrates into another level of in-sight. This threshold is an edge where fear and desire meet.
On that threshold, according to Dr. Richard Moss, author of “The I That Is We,” we must “let go unconditionally into the wholeness of ourselves, into a new space in which life and death are the same process. This process of fear/contraction exists in one form or another as a kind of death space in every individual. It is the key pattern that, when released, somehow unlocks life as we live it Now. As the new energy level increases, this pattern will solidify, and it will only dissolve when we finally release to the new level of being.”
Clearly this Full Moon and New Horizons call our attention to Pluto. Typically on a journey to Pluto’s realm, there is a sacrifice demanded, that coin we give because we know that the trip must be worth something. It is often experiences of loss or pain, or a deeply-felt necessity that give us the willingness to overcome our dread and approach the threshold to this Plutonian void or black hole/black whole, that is full of presence and bubbling potential. A vast pouring forth with richness of insight that transforms life.
Whew, this is deep stuff! I’m interested to see how this plays out upon our collective visit to Pluto. Even more, I’m interested in how we experience this on a collective level. We’re each a drop in the sea. I’m going to do my part. How about you?
To sweeten the moment, the high drama is highlighted by the gorgeous Jupiter-Venus conjunction that opens the night sky show. These two brightest of stellar diamonds invite us to wish for our heart’s true desire.
“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight.”
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