Listen to tonight’s Planet Waves FM here
The Libra New Moon takes place at 11:47 pm ET on Monday, Oct. 8, less than a degree away form the midpoint of that sign. An event at the midpoint of a cardinal sign is in itself significant, granting it expanded influence through a connection to the Thema Mundi, the hypothetical chart of the world (which has 15 degrees Cancer rising).
The closest and most striking aspect in this chart is a conjunction of the Moon and the Sun to Ceres. The first minor planet, Ceres represents the feminine principle as we associate her with Gaia, the Earth, and with the Virgin Mary. Ceres also represents the principle of liminality: that which is lurking on the horizon of consciousness, sometimes available to perception and sometimes not.
As such, it’s fitting that Ceres also represents the collective grief of women (she loses her daughter to the underworld, for half the year, anyway, which is a mythological representation of why it’s cold in the winter: the Earth is grieving for her).
Recent events surrounding the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court describe a kind of prolonged political winter, and have illuminated the anger and a sense of loss that many women feel in our time, and perhaps have felt for time immemorial. When grief of any kind is suppressed, it turns to depression, rage and chaos.
Yet apropos of the theme of liminality, we cannot ignore the grief of men: the untold millions who have died in wars for years, those who have been injured and disfigured, and those forced to serve (which means to kill people they often know are innocent); the agony of those falsely imprisoned and executed; the fathers who have lost sons, daughters and wives.