By Amanda Painter
No matter what the weatherman may be saying where you live, we’re on the verge of a new season: the Sun ingresses Aries Friday, heralding spring in the Northern Hemisphere (and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere). But this is no ordinary equinox, with its equal day and night; an eclipse is ushering the Sun into its new sign. The astrology right now is suggesting you dream big — but do so with a strategy.
Land snail in El Yunque National Rainforest, Puerto Rico. Photo by Amanda Painter.
About 13 hours before the Sun enters Aries at 6:45 pm EDT (22:45 UTC), we have a New Moon at 5:36 am EDT (9:36 UTC) in Pisces. That’s a conjunction of the Sun and Moon in the last degree of the last sign of the zodiac. It also happens to be a total solar eclipse (not visible here, sadly, but still big news astrologically).
There is much I could write about this rather amazing astrological event. So I’m going to home in on just one facet of it, and leave some of the other avenues of discussion to my colleagues.
Squaring the Pisces New Moon and eclipse are a pair of minor planets in late Sagittarius: asteroid Pallas and centaur object Pholus. These two planets are, in turn, conjunct the center of our galaxy.
The message of the Galactic Center is about “the big picture.” You can think of it as that sensation you get when you know something is important or has meaning, but can’t quite put your finger on it, or can’t pull back far enough to see it all with any perspective. You just know it matters, in some truly deep or elevated way.
A New Moon in Pisces is already about visualizing a new start; square the Galactic Center, you might feel a push to make your vision count on a big-picture scale. Yet you can’t just leave it to happenstance that you’ll be able to manifest what you visualize in life.
For one, you need to take actual action (this, by the way, is the domain of the Sun once it moves into Aries). Striking out willy-nilly only gets you so far, though, even if you’re lucky. You need a strategy if you’re truly serious about bringing your vision into reality. Pallas takes that ability to plan out the steps to a level beyond a simple “to do” list.
Pholus in the picture sends a dual message. In one incarnation, Pholus could give real legs to whatever you set in motion with this eclipse, in a good way; it carries as one of its key phrases “small cause, big effect.” But Pholus is a centaur planet, and centaurs have to do with the past; specifically, bringing past patterns to your awareness. Square Friday’s eclipse, Pholus suggests you look around (that is, within) for something that has been going on for a while. It might be something you’re ready to release to make space for your big dreams and accompanying strategy.
Or as Eric mentioned to me, it could mean that, “You may be doing something your grandma could not do.” Not everyone in your family tree has necessarily felt like the world was their oyster, much less one they were empowered to co-create.
The shadow side of Pallas and Pholus on the Galactic Center square this eclipse is that without a strategy (Pallas), things could go out of control (Pholus) even if well intentioned. We’re in an astrological window with an amazing amount of potential energy, including ancestral energy; you could harness that. But it will take a conscious plan to do so.
Bear in mind that harnessing this energy is not a one-shot deal on Friday. Eclipses come in pairs (sometimes trios), and the accompanying lunar eclipse in this pair is April 4. The two-week window between eclipses can have a special space-out-of-time quality; the astrology is inviting you to get started now using this window as consciously as you can.
No “should” or “I ought to” or “why can’t I” necessary; Pisces is about feeling your way and Aries is about making your way. Tune into the first, and you may very well find the second easier than expected. Begin with what you love.
I’m lucky enough to be able to experience the eclipse tomorrow morning as I live in South West England. We will be getting 85% coverage of the Sun here so we are hoping for clear skies for this momentous occasion!
Thank you for a very informative article.
This is really inspiring! I can feel the energy already, have been feeling it ramping up since the weekend and the final Uranus-Pluto exact square. I feel incredibly positive, which feels great. I do have dreams, I do have a strategy, and I can’t wait for it to manifest. Thank you Amanda!
I Love Astrology!
It’s a beautiful wonder the aspects, the alignments, the synchronous activity that surrounds us.
I’ve been putting awareness into the moments of exact aspects, say the uranus-pluto squares, or the cardinal cross last year, and during the moments and hours of the exact aspects I have experience a beautiful balance, a center of the storm phenomena, a certain equilibrium.
What an amazing and curious New Year approaching. Dream Big with a Strategy – Love that , and it personally fits and feels in tune. Eclipse seasons are like these little wormhole phenomena mysteriously transporting psychic soulful growth, experience, perspective and perception.
May all of our intents be big dreams with loving strategy.
Thank you for your article.
Perfect, I’ve got my performance piece all worked out, and I’ll be ready to perform it this Saturday for my grad school audition. Small cause, big effect indeed. This is the chance I’ve been waiting for, probably since before I was even aware. My piece is centered on healing, and freedom. I’ll share with everyone a poem I recently wrote that will be a part of my piece:
Born wounded, wailing and flailing
they cut my umbilical with stainless steel
in a sterile room with strangers staring.
I came here to heal the frightened animal within.
I call on Chiron, the wounded healer,
half asteroid, half comet
galloping in an orbit steep & wide,
to cure the riff between my body & mind,
help make whole these fragments
that keep me torn between man & beast.
Good luck, Michael! And may Boulder provide you sweet sanctuary on your journey.
Good luck Michael. I love the poetry. And the idea that dance cures the riff between body and mind.
What a great article!
I just want to add something small: “Allowing” is a kind of “work” as well. We can get so specific and caught up in making things happen that we forget to enjoy letting it all play out. Sometimes what comes knocking looks different than what was expected but is precisely the gift that is needed.
Amanda: Love how you combine Pallas, Pholus and The Core in such a cogently cornucopian manner! A lovely piece that really nails a moment when concentric cycles converge eccentrically.
OR should i say (in honor of your photo) “snails” the moment?
Michael: Thank you for the admirable poem. Best of luck on your performance piece.
Kind of excited here since my sun is at 29 Pisces. This one should be interesting!
Stephanie, Eskimobee, goatwool, Michael, Hugging S, Len, Christine — thank you all for chiming in! Gratified to know this post is resonating; as I mentioned to Len in an email, I had to battle to some real writers block yesterday to focus, and ended up cutting whole paragraphs and associated ideas from my first drafts. Apparently that Mercury-Neptune conjunction was right between my MC and Jupiter, and the magnification effect of a fuzzy, distracted was challenging.
Hugging Scorpio: good point about “allowing” being a form of work. I think that’s where setting intentions and laying the groundwork of a strategy can mesh with “the flow”: prepare the ground, and then prepare to embrace what the preparation has made space for — even if it veers from “the plan” significantly. Then adjust/adapt accordingly.
yes – the only thing that really worked well yesterday for myself with the nept/merc aspect was listening to music Without lyrics. In retrospect I realized that was mostly The Dirty Three’s 1998 Album “Ocean Songs” ( a rather neptunian titled) and classical radio.
“You may be doing something your grandma could not do.” Wow, I’ve been feeling this for a long time. I am so excited about this eclipse cycle. Having learned (at PW!) how to consciously work with the energy of eclipses over the past couple of years, I’m truly excited about putting this energy to use in my life. It feels like the past few years have been about tear down, restructure, rethink,…and there’s now this energy of “Now that you’re here, fully, and you know who you are, what are you going to do with all this?” It’s like that tear-down mode has more or less quieted, and now there’s so much energy around “You’re here, you did all that; now let’s use what you’ve become to do something great.” And there’s so much ancestral oomph! behind what I’m feeling. I appreciate your naming it, Amanda.
Strawberry — and I’m equally grateful that Eric typed that phrase in our chat. I’d momentarily lost sight of the ancestral angle with Pholus, not to mention the South Node. And yes, I think I know what you mean about getting through the “tearing down” stage, and now being faced with that question of “what do I do, now that I’m here?”
Amazing piece Amanda. I feel excited and enlivened coming into the Equinox and the Eclipse.
Ancestral energies running strong…coming up in conversations with friends lately we’re all feeling ancient struggles rumbling. I haven’t been remembering many dreams since I started sleeping outside, but I have a medicine bag of dreams in my organic memory that still inform my path. One of those dreams showed me my Great Grandfather’s desire to leave the opulence of his wife’s connections to the Holy Roman Empire and “go back to the river”. He moved to America and died when my grandma was young, but something of his desire lived on and connected with the Native Americans back in my Dad’s great-great ancestral pool to teach me how to cool off the old Norse and German bad man energy. These ancestral streams seem to be informed by an ancestress from Sumeria who I’ve contacted in the spirit world: she’s teaching me how to be the kind of man who knows how to control his sexual energies, whose head is rooted in his heart and belly. I’ve been feeling them all lately, but especially the Sumerian priestess: I’ve been working on eroding my automatic diss tendencies for awhile now, but her glowing presence in the past month or so are making that automatic glitch so weak that my love surrounds and dissolves it before it can make any external waves. Aaaahhhh…yes. Being a disser hurts as much, maybe more than being dissed.
“Begin with what you love.” Thank you, Amanda. I needed that. With all the insightful offerings I’ve read on tomorrow’s eclipse, yours has added the exclamation point. The eclipse makes a T to my Mars/Saturn square – (Mars is at the Galactic degree). You have given me much to think about. My New Moon intentions are on track…