This Tuesday, July 16, is the Capricorn Full Moon and partial lunar eclipse. It’s essentially direct-dialing into the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of January 2020 — no operator to transfer the call, no Skype interface, no going straight to voicemail. Whatever comes up for you this week with this eclipse is most likely to be what the Saturn-Pluto conjunction is about for you in January.

Image by Lisa Ann Yount.

Is your reflexive response to reading that one of fear, or a desire to avoid it all? Are you at all curious? What are you feeling, and do you have any strategies to address it?

As was noted in the Thursday edition, all the biggest issues right now are Capricorn related: things like family, work responsibility, accountability in many other forms, and corporate and government power. Related to its Saturn rulership, sometimes events or natal chart placements in Capricorn can feel heavy or depressive. Capricorn issues tend to feel very ‘real’ — as in: tangible, concrete, inescapable. Unlike, say, Pisces with its dreamy, ephemeral flow; or Sagittarius with its philosophical abstractions.

So not only does a Full Moon inherently imply a confrontation, but there’s something about that idea carried by the sign Capricorn itself. There are times when we can think of confrontation as being like a dance: two partners facing each other, moving in synchrony with give and take, or with a clear lead and a responsive follow. It can be a negotiation process. Sometimes confrontation is more like mirroring: being met externally by something or someone that offers a view of our inner selves that would otherwise be hard to see and understand.

And then there are the kinds of confrontations that make people cower, panic, dive headlong into denial, slide into passive aggression, or actively strike out in preemptive fear. Emotional power struggles with authority figures (anyone from parents to partners and bosses, right on up the social hierarchy) may be the most common. Fistfights and wars may be among the most violent. Confronting oneself in therapy, or after having made hurtful decisions, can also cause an avoidance reaction; it’s easier to pretend that it’s not even a real confrontation, and therefore does not require your participation.

But that’s the thing: all of these confrontation types, just like our current astrology, do require your participation. Yet before you can know what to do, you need to acknowledge, understand and articulate (if only to yourself) how you feel. At this time in history, society is being conditioned not to feel, and not to want to feel.

Image by tommyvideo.

Some of that conditioning is occurring through fearful and destructive events: global warming makes it seem like the world is crashing down around us and nothing can be done — though this is not true.

Same with far too many political events and movements. This weekend, 2,000 Latino immigrants were scheduled to be rounded up and deported, as an intentional fear tactic for anyone brown — and, really, for everyone else too.

When you step back a little and scan the overall environment, it can seem like everything falls into one of two categories: maximum density and heaviness; or bubblegum superficiality and elasticity, where anything can be stretched into anything else. Where is the middle? Is there no room for heart, soul, joy, connection and introspection?

Those questions bring us to one that’s even more fundamental: how human are you — and how do you know? How taken over by the Borg of digital life — of living externally online, of being conditioned to respond to every beep and ding, of buying into commercial ideals of status and beauty and ‘necessity’ — are you? If you want an astrological symbol for these questions, it comes in the form of Eris in Aries, exactly square the Capricorn Full Moon and eclipse. Eris is pushing these issues right now.

Have you confronted whoever represents the Saturn and Pluto influences in your life? You might start with anyone who seems to be standing in your way, is literally exerting their authority and power over you, or whom you are afraid may do so if you try to express your own will.

Image by JIHALA.

From there, you may be able to trace your emotional responses or the structure of the interpersonal dynamic backward through your past.

Do your feelings about the current situation remind you of your feelings about anyone from early in your life? Is that person’s voice, disguised as your own, still speaking from the director’s chair in your mind?

You have some ideas now to play with as you orient your kayak toward the eclipse rapids. If you’ve been reading Planet Waves for a while you’re familiar with the advice to do some of what you love around eclipses, to help catalyze new patterns in the coming months. If you love how you feel after you’ve turned a key in one of the locks of your healing and growth process, you may be able to see the value of including some of this seemingly more serious material in your process the next few days.

The Capricorn Full Moon is exact at 5:38 pm EDT (21:38:06 UTC) on Tuesday, though Serennu.com lists the peak of the partial lunar eclipse (which is the Earth coming between the Sun and the Moon) about eight and a half minutes earlier. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction is exact in almost precisely six months — the span of time you could normally expect to see how this eclipse ripples out and develops. If a veil seems to be drawn back Tuesday night, pay attention to what you see.