By Amanda Painter
How are you doing? It’s been quite a week, and I’ve been hearing from friends and colleagues who are in various forms and stages of grieving, activating, creating, planning, worrying, escaping and engaging in deep self-care.
Monday’s Taurus Full Moon rising over the islands of Casco Bay off Portland, Maine. Photo by Amanda Painter.
The Sun is moving through its last few days of Scorpio; it will enter Sagittarius on Monday. Between now and then, the astrology appears to be indicating a few forms of action and awareness.
For example, today the dwarf planet Ceres retrogrades into a conjunction with Eris (with Uranus nearby). Eris has been in a long conjunction with Uranus this year, an aspect that illustrates the upsets, bizarre developments and general chaos we’ve seen around us — particularly in the political realm.
If you have not shut down your Facebook and Twitter accounts and tossed your TV to try and escape, see if you can spot any trends in the news around the theme of revisiting what we thought would feed us, but did not. And be on the lookout for anyone resembling a modern-day goddess or mother figure willing to enter the chaos to try and put it right. (This is not to say you should wait for a goddess to save things; you simply might see the astrology manifesting in such a figure. Looking for and cultivating your own inner Ceres is where the real work lies.)
On a more internal and psychological level, if you’re feeling at all like last week’s election dismisses, demeans or discounts any part of your identity (especially any facet of your feminine side), consider seeking out ways to nourish that part of yourself. Given that the conjunction is in Aries, some form of action or expression of desire and motivation could be very empowering.
Speaking of desire, the Scorpio Sun squares asteroid Eros in Aquarius tomorrow at 10:00 am EST (15:00 UTC). Anyone who’s read a horoscope knows that Scorpio is associated with sex. Eros is named after the god of love (it’s where we get the word ‘erotic’). Yet Aquarius often signifies groups, especially ‘elite’ groups.
My first thought on seeing this aspect was: are you feeling any tension between what ‘everybody else’ or ‘the cool kids’ thinks is sexy, versus what really gets you hot? Popular culture and media are saturated with sexual imagery. Yet, much of it seems divorced from realistic sexual relating, and often lacks the deep emotional connection Scorpio craves.
The Sun signifies conscious awareness. So, in what ways are you aware of your sexuality this week? Are your most private, secret sexual desires drastically at odds with how you present your erotic side socially? What happens if you imagine everyone knowing you this way? It’s just a thought experiment, but one you might find insightful — and possibly even exciting.
Also exact tomorrow, Mercury in Sagittarius squares Neptune in Pisces at 11:04 am EST (16:04 UTC). Mercury will be square the lunar nodes, too (indicators of ‘dharma’ and ‘karma’), which are on the Virgo-Pisces axis.
In combination with the Sun-Eros square, this suggests that you could go pretty deep into your sexual fantasies, especially the ones that feel particularly risky, adventurous or liberating.
Yet you could also lean on the Mercury-Neptune energy through a different sort of dreaming. It might take more effort, but clearly our culture needs as many people as possible to engage in big-picture visioning for how to move forward right now. Sometimes it’s necessary to go all pie-in-the-sky first — before you figure out the practical plan — to keep motivation and faith from flagging.
Not everybody will necessarily understand, and that’s okay. If you can be optimistic without being in denial of verifiable facts, and if you can be clear with others without keeping inconvenient information secret, you may find that you can identify small, practical steps to begin manifesting at least some part of the dream.
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Amanda,
“And be on the lookout for anyone resembling a modern-day goddess or mother figure willing to enter the chaos to try and put it right.” Isn’t this the problem? Obama became president on the promise of hope and *change.* So what happened? People sat on their rear ends – myself included- waiting for him to perform miracles and save us. It doesn’t happen that way. He was the motivator for us to change, holding out hope as motivation. We were supposed to do the work as a whole people in this country. And now here we are. Hoping for a goddess to come in and save us all is not going to work. We need to do. We need to work. And if a goddess comes in to guide us, that would be great, but we cannot expect her to do it alone.
Naomi — you misunderstand what I was trying to say, which probably means I did not say it clearly enough. 🙂 My point was only to encourage readers to notice how the astrology might present itself around them, since the Uranus-Eris conjunction (and the transiting aspects that have highlighted it) have played out most clearly on a cultural/global/political scale.
By no means was I suggesting that people “hope for a goddess to come in and save us all” — not at all. In fact, I end my piece by suggesting that people stay alert for small, practical steps they themselves can take.
But thank you for pointing me to where I could have been more clear. I might edit an additional sentence into the piece to clarify; I’ll mull that over.