Jupiter in Virgo Vs. Neptune In Pisces
Today’s Pisces Full Moon ( 6 Pi 06′, 2:35 pm EDT) paints a fascinating picture of possibility, with both of Pisces’ ruling planets strongly involved in the chart. The Sun in Virgo is conjunct Pisces’ traditional ruler Jupiter and the Full Moon conjuncts Pisces’ modern ruling planet Neptune. Both conjunctions are within about degrees of orb, meaning the alignments are quite powerful.
So what does this mean?
7 Pisces: An Illuminated Vision of Your Soul’s Purpose
The Sabian symbol for the degree of the Full Moon is: Illumined by a shaft of light, a large cross lies on rocks surrounded by sea mist.
Dane Rudhyar called this symbol: “The spiritual blessing which strengthens individuals, who, happen what may, stand uncompromisingly for their own truth.”
Look, there’s a lot of darkness in the world these days. Bad shit keeps happening and the 24-hour news and opinion cycle makes sure we know about it. This Full Moon reminds you to keep your eyes on the cross – your sacred mission in this lifetime, your soul’s purpose for incarnating. Yes, the waves of the boundless ocean are pounding all around you and, yes, the fog threatens to obscure your vision. But there’s that shaft of light that keeps illuminating what you know you want most out of life.
So look for glimpses this weekend of “your real life” – the life your soul has always longed for you to live. Maybe you know exactly what this life looks like in your mind’s eye. You see the place where you’re living. You know how you start your day. You can picture yourself going through your ideal day, interacting with the people you want to share your experiences with, doing the things that bring your joy and enable you to be of service to the world.
For many of us, our ideal life is experienced more as a loosely-woven pattern of images and feelings .We’re pretty clear on some of what we want. We’re really clear on a couple things we don’t want any longer! But the good life we long to be living is more of a vibe than a detailed picture.
Don’t get hung up on how clear you feel about who you are and what, exactly, you’re supposed to be doing with your life. You know what that vibe feels like. You’ve probably already felt the vibe intensifying over the past few days. Or you may have imagined yourself – more vividly than usual – living into one of those beautiful inner pictures you often describe to yourself as your dreams or your vision or “what I want to manifest”.
Under the energies of today’s Full Moon, the Cosmos and the planetary council are sending you these pictures and feelings of “potential near-future you” to encourage you to dare to believe in your inner vision.
The Sabian symbol for 9 Pisces, where Neptune sits, is: A jockey spurs his horse, intent on outdistancing his rivals. Rudhyar sees this symbol as “the need to spur one’s total being toward speedy attainment of one’s goal.”
How energizing would it be if you really did dare to believe that the vision that keeps showing up in your mind and heart is there because that’s what the world wants most for you to live into – despite any and all contrary circumstances?
Sun & Jupiter in Virgo: Expand Progress, Not Perfectionism
The Sabian symbols for the Sun and Jupiter are similarly illuminating (with Dane Rudhyar’s keywords from his book An Astrological Mandala):
Virgo 7 – the Sun – A Harem. The EMPTINESS OF WAITING
Virgo 4 – Jupiter – Black and white children play together happily. BROTHERHOOD
I found the “harem” symbol puzzling at first, but on our tribe Full Moon Call this week, my colleague Laura helped me tune in to how it fits into the overall picture. One of Rudhyar’s phrases for this degree is: ” A number of individuals all subjected to the same fate.”
Laura suggested that the emptiness in this symbol is the hollow feeling that permeates our lives when we are waiting to be chosen by the mythical sultan or whoever controls the harem, rather than actively choosing to do whatever we can do today to live into our soul mission.
Jupiter just moved into Virgo on August 11. Although Jupiter almost always acts beneficially, Virgo is one of his detriment signs. Jupiter expands everything he touches. So while he transits Virgo over the next 12 months, Jupiter can either expand our willingness to dig into the details, get organized, and make discriminating choices about how we use our time and where we focus our energy…
Or he can expand the shadow energies of Virgo: self-judgment, blame, and the paralysis that comes when we seek perfection rather than perpetual progress.
And isn’t that exactly how the System (the Matrix) is set up? In the big harem of our global culture, we are consistently being told: Don’t even try to change your life, because you’re stuck here. Know your place. Accept your lot. No way out.
And it’s not just the “powers that be” that reinforce this insidious propaganda. It’s our friends, our family, our spouses and our children. “Don’t change!” they implore us. In order for me to feel safe, I need you to stay the same. If you break free, then I’ll have to face the fact that maybe I could, too.”
Jupiter’s degree at the Full Moon seems to point to the way out of the harem: We can break free if we work together. So much of the astrology of 2015 makes direct reference to the 1960s. I can’t help but think of the Civil Rights Movement, of Jewish intellectuals from New York traveling to Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina to be beaten up and jailed alongside their black brothers and sisters.
Why should society be set up so that most people spend the bulk of their waking hours with people they wouldn’t normally choose to hang out with, doing work that they don’t enjoy and in many cases are not particularly well-suited for?
This is the new revolution, what I’ve come to think of as the Cultural Creatives Revolution: trying to re-vision society and create a world in which we all get to make a good living doing what we love. A world in which we experience the joy of sharing our giftedness with each other, rather than a world in which me make a virtue of commiserating with our fellow prisoners.
Hurricane Katrina 10 Years After: The Pisces Full Moon and the Katrina Chart
I find it fascinating that today’s Full Moon happens exactly ten years to the date when Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, August 29, 2005. Since the date is the same, the Sun is in the same degree (7 Virgo) in both the Katrina chart and today’s Full Moon chart.
If you want to skip me geeking out over the astrology of Katrina, New Orleans and today’s Pisces Full Moon, check out the song I wrote for my daughter, Hurricane Girl. In my blog post about the song, I reminisce about my experiences after Katrina, and share how tuning in to the Sabian symbols for today’s Full Moon helped me overcome the demons of perfectionism and finish the song.
We can see that Neptune in today’s chart is in the same degree as New Orleans’ natal Pluto in Pisces. In the 2005 Katrina landfall chart, Uranus was atop New Orleans’ natal Pluto, a conjunction exact to one arc minute (1/60th of a degree). That conjunction, exact as it was, wouldn’t have been enough on its own to trigger the Plutonian death and rebirth saga that was Hurricane Katrina. In Hard Times in the Big Easy: Hurricane Katrina and the Chart of New Orleans, Jackie Slevin does a wonderful job of delineating in just a few paragraphs how New Orleans’ progressed chart and prenatal eclipse aligned with the transits of August 29, 2005 to create the astrological conditions for the perfect storm.
That’s the City of New Orleans chart on the inside and the chart for the moment when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005 on the outside.
Uranus and Pluto, boy! They’re like bad pennies – they keep popping up all over. (Or, to get more on Pluto’s wavelength, as a friend of mine described the previous time New Orleans had suffered major flooding: “It was bad, DK. Caskets were poppin’ up outta tha ground!”)
There they are conjunct in New Orleans 10th House of public presence. With Pluto, you’re always going to experience the death of something that has outlived its usefulness and needs to be regenerated into a newer and more vital form. This is why we know that many key elements of world society and its major systems (the corporate global economy, health care, education and how we take care of – or not – our elders) are going to degenerate and pass away between now and 2023.
But as many of us who suffered through Katrina and her aftermath can testify, the rebirth part of Pluto is just as vital as the death part. On this tenth anniversary of the storm, may this Pisces Full Moon activate the positive potential of Neptune (the visionary imagination) and Jupiter (abundance, generosity, wisdom and expansiveness). May it bless all those who lived through Katrina – and the Katrina babies born as a result of the storm – and may we, in turn, bless the world by sharing our gifts and our optimism.