New Moon in Cancer: Love, Desire and Action

The Moon is most at home in the sign of Cancer, making each year’s Cancer New Moon like a double dose of everything this sign represents. It’s an introverted water sign. It’s about safety, parental protection, nurturance, and caring for the child-like parts of oneself.

The New Moon in Cancer on July 9, 6:16 p.m. Pacific (or July 10, depending on your location), will make aspects to all three of the major outer planets. That may give this time a kind of otherworldly feeling.

The Moon will have recently separated from an easy, facilitating sextile aspect with Uranus, the quirky force of sudden and unexpected changes. Uranus is a major sky player for the collective all this year as it is in a hard square with transiting Saturn. That’s the major transit for 2021. There are struggles over change versus maintenance of the status quo.

This New Moon will also be in a harmonious trine to the slow-moving outer planet Neptune, which has been making its way through Pisces since 2012. Neptunian energy can be visionary and idealistic. It can also be naïve. A trine makes things easy, and with Neptune in trine to the July 9 New Moon chart, the boundaries between what is “me” what is everyone else might get loose. This can be helpful for cultivating one’s intuition, a Neptunian quality, but it’s also good to keep the lenses clean on one’s rose-colored glasses. 

This New Moon will also be in an opposition with the even slower-moving planet Pluto, in Capricorn since 2008.  Oppositions are not necessarily antagonistic. An opposition is relational, with each side having to face the other, and just deal.

Pluto is about the dynamics of power, the kind of power that is not so obvious on the surface, until it bubbles up from the underworld, like a volcanic lava that washes over everything in sight and reshapes the terrain into something one couldn’t have imagined. Pluto in the sign of Capricorn all these years has correlated with a collective focus on—and challenges to—systems of authority, whether those be in the realms of government, the economy, culture, or closer to home, our workplaces and families.

As I wrote about two weeks ago when the early Cancer Sun opposed the Capricorn Full Moon, both Cancer and Capricorn, in very different ways, have to do with parental care-taking. We revisit that theme again with the July 9 New Moon, facing Pluto in Capricorn. With Pluto opposing both the Sun and Moon, there may be a feeling of being overpowered. One might feel emotional pain intensely, maybe to the point of being able, finally, to release it. That would be Plutonian power in service of ultimate growth.

There’s another lovely event going on in the sky at this time, and that is the conjunction of inner (closer to the Sun) planets Venus and Mars. They meet up about every two years, this time in fire sign Leo, exact on July 13.  Mars and Venus are relational planets. Sparks may fly, in one’s love life, outwardly in fiery happenings, or inwardly in ourselves. 

Venus represents what we love and are drawn to: our aesthetic style, our ways of connecting with others. Mars is about courage and desire: what we want and are willing to take action to get.  

Leo is the sign ruled by the Sun. Its glyph looks a bit like a lion’s head and mane. Leo is lit up, dramatic, the star of the stage. More subtly, Leo is associated with creativity, the limelight within. 

The Venus-Mars conjunction, from about now until Venus enters the next sign, Virgo, on July 22, is an excellent time to focus on creativity. That need not be limited to things like painting or writing poetry. One can be creative in doing one’s yard work and bookkeeping!

The Sun, Leo’s guide, is a symbol of Creation itself and of the one Creator, the eternal flow. With Venus and Mars together in Leo, briefly, this month, the balancing act between love, desire, and action is a good place to put one’s attention. 

Blessings for the Cancerian New Moon!

~ Sara