At first glance, upon stumbling on Simone Butler’s essay on this Cancer New Moon Eclipse, I thought I’d been punk’d. How could we who do not know each other have written something so similar? All I saw were the words in bold, ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’. I felt flattered, then a little piqued at being mimicked, not unusual I suppose. When I got over myself and read further I discovered that she was using Sabian Symbols as Oracle, which, according to my new facebook acquaintance Lynda Hill and author of book by the same name, describes the oracular message of this eclipse degree. Although my turn of phrase was different, I had spoken about the crisis of the crumbling patriarchy without a feminine infrastructure to support a more balanced world. I had spoken as a ‘Daughter of the Sexual Revolution’.

You may be thinking this is no big deal, we’re all under the same stars, right? Yes, we astrologers are all in the same club and although we’re a diverse bunch, occasionally a few of us are bound to hit the same nail on the same head in almost exactly the same way. But this was different. I had unknowingly spoken about a Sabian Symbol interpretation from a book I’d never read.

There it was in black and white (or salmon and green): my voice had been used in service of the collective.

I’d been used by the Trickster him/her self, the Hermaphroditic God of Synchronicity, Alchemy, Perception, the Spoken and Written Word and Doubles. Jung might’ve called it synchronicity, but this falls beyond a more personal synchronicity, venturing into Anima Mundi or world soul territory. My voice had been Mercurial-ized for the masses. This Solar Eclipse falls within one degree of my Mercury in Cancer.

It’s been an interesting month. I lost my voice at the first New Moon in Cancer, re-discovered it at the Full Moon Capricorn eclipse, and here I stand negotiating a new relationship to it. Did I mention that my progressed Mercury in Cancer has been retrograde for more years than I can remember, and it’s going direct this September?

Oh, and another strange thing has happened with my voice. Specifically, my r’s. More Bwooklyn than Brooklyn, I can’t really identify a dialect or accent, but something’s stubbornly stumbling out. I’ve joked with my husband that maybe ‘foreign language syndrome’ is coming on, that disease where people from California start talking like they’re from 17th century Ireland. Or maybe it’s the book I’m reading that’s rubbing off.

Or maybe I’ve entered the lunar realm.

The lunar realm is the realm of intuition, and sub-liminal awareness. We ‘pick up’ on things in the lunar realm, that aren’t easily explained, or easily explained away. It’s notoriously hard to trust what’s coming through without melting down sometimes. Imagined impulses come to life, in an urge, daydream, mood, repetitive motion or unconscious moment and whether we ‘go there’ halfway, all the way or not at all it’s quite easy to think you’re ‘imagining things’ or that you’re crazy (Are they real? How real are they? What am I feeling?). Lunacy comes from the word lunar. Historically, we’ve been made ‘crazy’ by living in a solar world, one that speaks in a more obvious language, not the language of dreams and inward stirrings. Yet when we ‘go there,’ follow this… to wherever it leads we realize that life exists on a much deeper level than we thought it did just the day before. That’s the gift of going between, beneath, inside and within.

I may’ve been inspired by an idea, but I didn’t pick up on the Sabian symbol alone. Through the sign of Cancer, a sign sensitive to subtle shifts of consciousness, I was internally fielding the crisis of the feminine through my perceptions and being. The pressure built so that after it ‘came through’ I experienced a physical un-grounding, totally confirming my suspicions that there was more going on here. It wasn’t bad and it felt liberating, honestly; it’s just that the energy was too big to stay in my body-mind. To return to earth, I ended up walking through the Golden Gate park, watching the ducks swim for nearly half an hour. I gravitated toward the turtles, coming up beneath the surface of the green pond, then diving down below. I became transfixed by the big-mouthed Koi fish in the pond and then further, by what was below the pond, by what was beneath the surface – what I couldn’t see. What was happening on the surface only led me to want to know what was below. The type of information I was seeking was just below conscious awareness.

This New Moon Eclipse revives our collective feminine awareness. This is happening in the ‘crisis’ or anaretic degree, bringing urgency to the task. We are urged to follow what doesn’t make rational sense, and to surrender to the images, yearnings, impulses that flow through our mind, body and spirit so we can heal. The New Moon also receives a quincunx angle from Pluto, adding (or subtracting) elimination and breakdown to the breakthrough energy of the eclipse. It takes trust to enter into what comes up. It also takes a physical toll on the body, in the way the mouth of the earth opening up causes discomfort. There’s something shifting here, just below the surface of consciousness that can connect us right back to our very soul essence – the realm of Cancer. Anything we ‘stumble upon’ or open our hearts to bears a remembrance about who we essentially are. Also during this eclipse, Saturn, the boundary-maker is squaring Venus, our relatedness: we have each our limits, and we may need healthy boundaries to move forward in relationship or our relationship to the things we enjoy. Fences, when appropriately and properly placed, can bring freedom.

Since this eclipse falls on my Mercury, the Messenger, who travels easily among those ‘in between’ thoughts, the pauses between consciousness and dreaming and all divination systems, I’ve recently come into contact with divination tools that speak to me. Last night as I meditated on the meaning of this eclipse, I pulled a stone (Runes are a divination tool of the Norse God Odin, aka Mercury) heralding ‘Breakthrough’, or a 180 degree shift in orientation. While looking at another version of Sabian Symbols, Frequencies by Elias Lonsdale, the 30 Cancer degree seemed to capture the larger than life archetypal energies of this eclipse. So now, I’ll be quiet & let the poetry speak for itself (see below). During this last blast of Cancer right before this slow season of mystery moves into Leo heat, may your feminine wisdom – your dreams, your symbols, awareness, remembrance, senses and images – heal and nourish you. May your essence be restored.

Cancer 30
Wild grapes growing everywhere.

The yield is manifold. The crop is all the selves and worlds we have put out there. We reap the harvest of what we have brought forth into being. It is quite a spectacle to meet ourselves everywhere, to find so full a reflection thru our lives that we are the center of the maze, the heart of the mystery. Everything comes back to us. No matter how far we reach, it all turns out to be just us here, flowing together toward the common future.

We come at it each time as if it could not be so full of synchronicities, so uncanny. Yet the destiny twirls us to the same exact point, where the whole of existence is conspiring to bring us right back to ourselves so that we can complete what we have begun.The world’s most thematic and archetypal consciousness and life force. The representative of everybody, appearing in a thousand disguises. And there is a point to all this curving back around.

We are called in this degree to be alive within the Mysteries, to stumble upon what we’ve always known in ways which jog our memory and restore us to what “vanished” and never was gone. We are summoned to restore every ounce of the forgotten treasure. And we are empowered to do this in whatever way will strip us of every self-concept and self-image that stand between us and the real thing. When you have been this way countless times and you know every path in and out and thru, you can fall asleep and dream and miss your moment. 

Or you can go deeper and drink from the well of the Divine Feminine with the thirst of a child and the hunger of one who knows that nothing in the world can satisfy. Under the inside, we are returned to the beginning and this time we pay attention. – Frequencies, Elias Lonsdale