Regeneration, Healing and the Scorpio New Moon

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By Amanda Painter

There is plenty else going on in the world besides the calling out of sexual harassment and assault that needs our attention and energy. Yet, this is a huge topic at the moment — for good reason, given how much pain it has caused to so many people. If you’re finding yourself constantly triggered and exhausted, know that you are not alone, and it’s okay to take care of yourself and to seek help.

In the moment before regeneration; photo by Amanda Painter.

In the moment before regeneration; photo by Amanda Painter.

With a New Moon in Scorpio on Saturday, exact at 6:42 am EST (11:42 UTC), it seems the cosmos is asking us to consider where we go from here.

Hopefully the current spotlight on the lopsided sexual power dynamic has gotten you thinking — I mean really thinking — about the many layers of this issue in our culture; about how we got here and what your own role has been; and, perhaps most importantly, how to move forward into healing individually and collectively.

That’s a lot to take on. You might find that you can handle some facets of the conversation but not others. Or you might find yourself at one end of the healing process (for example, just beginning to identify how you’ve been hurt, or how you’ve hurt others), and it might seem impossible to envision getting to a place where you’ll feel better and can stand more fully in your life.

Wherever you locate yourself, it’s okay to be where you are with it. And it’s okay if where you are in your process does not look much like where someone else is in their process. As Eric and I discussed in the Monday Astrology Diary, all of the perspectives along the continuum of healing — which includes holding space for others to heal — are valid and valuable.

There are many cultural and astrological factors contributing to why all of this is coming into widespread consciousness now. Rather than trying to enumerate all of them, I’d like to consider what the current astrology has to say about what we do next. Which brings me to this weekend’s Scorpio New Moon.

Scorpio is the sign of sex, death, taxes and regeneration; the sign of flushing out toxins. A New Moon — the conjunction of the Sun and Moon in the same slice of the zodiac — signals the beginning of a new cycle.

The first thing that caught my eye about how this new cycle begins is the degree of the New Moon: 27 Scorpio. There’s a set of channeled, symbolic images called the Sabian Symbols that correspond to each of the zodiac degrees. Probably the most famous version of these symbols is the one reinterpreted by astrologer Dane Rudhyar.

The image for 27 Scorpio is, “A military band marches noisily on through the city streets.” Rudhyar also give the image a keynote: “The aggressive glorification of cultural values.”

Indeed, that keynote strikes me as very descriptive of our current moment. Although “glorification” does not feel like the best word to use, there’s certainly an aggressiveness with which cultural values are being claimed (in the case of speaking out against sexual violence and harassment) and vilified (in the case of the ‘shadow value’ that has long influenced society: that it’s acceptable for men to abuse power over women sexually).

Yet, making noise cannot be the sole point or the end goal. It’s a beginning — the attention-drawing interruption — so that something new has space in which to emerge.

Offering hints of what that might be, the Sun and Moon in Scorpio are within a degree or two of contact with some very telling astrological bodies. Exactly opposite the New Moon is Sedna in Taurus. Conjunct the Scorpio New Moon is the asteroid Aphrodite. And making harmonious aspects to both the Scorpio trio and Sedna is Chiron in Pisces.

Without getting too bogged down in mythological details, here’s what I’m seeing: Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, was born from the sea, regenerated from Uranus’ genitals; Sedna’s limbs regenerated in the depths of the sea into the great sea mammals that fed the Inuit.

There would seem to be a theme here about how removing something is not the end of the story. Speaking specifically about toxic cultural dynamics, cutting oneself off from them is not enough. There must be a process of regeneration that takes place and fills the space that is opening up with all the noise we’re making.

Chiron, the great teacher and wounded healer of Greek mythology, is currently located in the great collective waters of Pisces and is making supportive aspects to the Sun, Moon, Aphrodite and Sedna in this chart. But Chiron cannot do it alone. Chiron represents the crisis that gets your attention. Once you’ve noticed it, it’s up to you to address it; to document it; to seek out the tools and resources and community and help to heal what has become too painful to ignore any longer.

As I said earlier in this piece, there are many places along the healing path. You don’t need to try to inhabit or embody all of them at once; you don’t need to try to skip steps. But it’s clear we’re all in this together, even if you don’t think you’ve ever been a ‘victim’ or a ‘perpetrator’ of abusive sexual power.

You have the opportunity to be part of the solution — to assist in the regeneration — even if it is simply by taking modest steps in your own sexual healing. Perhaps especially by doing so.

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By any standards, 2018 will be a distinctive year astrologically. Get your essential guide to riding the waves of the next 12 months and beyond. Pre-order The Art of Becoming, the 2018 Planet Waves Annual by Eric Francis.

3 thoughts on “Regeneration, Healing and the Scorpio New Moon”

  1. sally

    Thanks for your take on our moment. Valuing, resources, and exchanges of all sorts seem to be up for review. The cognitive dissonance of the Roy Moore scandal is a strange thing to witness as its a caricature of the political story we’ve heard so many times before. People are hearing and experiencing it differently this time around and any gesticulations of defense require more depth of explanation than society previously demanded. I’ve participated in conversations about this scandal where I hear the other grappling to find a new story, because the old defense, disbelieving the women, doesn’t work this time, but the new narrative also hasn’t formed. It’s this gap that holds potential but also scares me. What is going to fill that space we’re creating collectively by releasing so much trapped pain? A backlash feels like an old story, but a ripe possibility. I’m working to try and have deeper conversations with acquaintances around abuse of power and desire than I would have previously. I’m telling some of my old stories, it’s time.

    An essential feminist voice I’ve found in the midst of so much great writing in this moment of grappling is Laurie Penny. Specifically, “The Horizon of Desire” https://longreads.com/2017/10/10/the-horizon-of-desire/ as the url implies, the essay is long, but so worth the time to read in full. Respecting women’s desire and autonomy is a vast cultural shift, impacting far more areas of life than the bedroom.

    An excerpt:

    Today’s sexual freedom is rather like today’s market freedom, in that what it practically entails is freedom for people with power to dictate terms and freedom for everyone else to shut up and smile. We have come to accept, as in so many areas of life, a vision of freedom whereby the illusion of choice is a modesty slip for unspeakable everyday violence.

    Consent culture, first named by activist and sex-critical feminist Kitty Stryker, is the alternative to all this. Resisting a culture of rape and abuse must involve more than insisting on the individual right to say no — although that’s both a decent starting place and a difficult concept for some people to wrap their RedTube-rotted brains around. There’s a reason for that. The reason that the notion of real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent is so outrageous is that the concept of female sexual agency — let alone active desire — is still a fearful one. Our culture still has very little room for the idea that women and queer people, given the chance, want and enjoy sex just as much as men do.

    Well before they are old enough to start thinking about having it, girls are still trained to imagine sex as something that will be done to them, rather than something they might like to do for its own sake. We grow up with warnings that sexuality in general and heterosexuality in particular is a fearful, violent thing; sex is something we must avoid, rather than something we have. If we’re able to recognize that we want it of our own accord, we learn that we are deviant, dirty, and wicked. The legion of one-handed-typers on misogynist subreddits, wondering why on earth it’s so hard for them to get laid, wondering why women don’t make approaches, why we use sex as a social bargaining strategy, would do well to remember that straight women didn’t come up with those rules. Most of us are proficient at suffocating our own desires, because withholding sexuality is the only social power we are permitted — even if that permission is given grudgingly and unreliably by a culture that calls us sluts and bitches and whores when we don’t say no but can’t be relied on to believe us when we do. This, too, is rape culture. Rape culture is not about demonizing men. It is about controlling female sexuality. It is anti-sex and anti-pleasure. It teaches us to deny our own desire as an adaptive strategy for surviving a sexist world.

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