It is Scorpio season now, and we have a New Moon on November 4, 2021 at 2:15 p.m. on the West Coast. We have entered the darkest part of the year in the northern hemisphere.
Scorpio may be the most enigmatic of the zodiacal signs. It’s a water sign, and it’s fixed. How can water be fixed? Water moves. With Cancer, the water element is like a forward-motion river, and with Pisces, the water is like the irrepressible waves of the unfathomably vast oceans.
Scorpionic water is different. It’s like a deep, dark lagoon. There are strange bugs and plants, algae and other spooky stuff. No one wants to go there.
Yet it is way down there, with the creatures at the bottom of the lagoon, that things can get very exciting, as it is in the dark and the muck and the grime, that life grows.
It is in wet mud where the lotus flower grows. There is the great mantra chanted by Tibetan Buddhists: Om Mane Padme Hum. It means that the jewel is in the lotus. No mud, no lotus.
The chart for this New Moon is not an easy one. It is muddy, dark and profound. It is fixed energy: stay still. Scorpionic, fixed water, is associated with subterranean themes and qualities. These include the less flattering ones like jealousy, suspiciousness, intrigue. And also the investigative imperative, the drive to get to the bottom of things, asking: why, and with each answer given, why, again.
At this lunation, Mars has also recently entered Scorpio, its home water sign. Mars functions exceptionally well in Scorpio. That’s called essential dignity. Mars (action) in fixed water might seem to be an odd placement, but it’s really not. Martian energy has the quality of incisiveness, cutting to the chase. Mars in Scorpio is like a holder of secrets and a sharp interrogator.
Mars at three degrees of Scorpio will be in a wide conjunction with the Sun and Moon, amping up this lunation, which comes just two weeks before we’ll have a lunar eclipse on November 19. Mars down deep in the water, aligned with the invisible Moon on November 4, spells a type of excavation of what we may feel to be low and dirty in our emotions and psyches. What is down there? Who knows? At the New Moon, nothing’s visible. There is only potential to soon see.
There may be surprises. At this lunation, the Sun and Moon will be within just minutes of a precise opposition with Uranus, the outer planet of unexpected break-throughs. Uranus is in Taurus (2018 to 2026), the sign of fixed earth. Taurus represents our needs for physical survival. Polar opposites, Scorpio and Taurus, deep dark water and deep dark earth.
Facing Uranus at the New Moon, there might be some weird event or jolt, a recognition of one’s own most stirring, even uncomfortable emotional patterns. Muddy compost will make the plants grow green. It’s OK to touch it.
This New Moon will be a tense one. The Sun-Moon opposition with Uranus forms a T-square with Saturn in its fixed air sign Aquarius. The Uranus-Saturn square has been the predominant outer planet transit all this year and will be in effect in 2022 as well. (There will be an exact Saturn-Uranus square on December 23/24, the third exact pass this year.)
Saturn is about limits and the status quo. Uranus is the lightning bolt aiming to tear it all down. Planets in a square aspect are like two planes of reality at right angles, in each other’s way, unable to escape. Old and new must somehow live with each other.
There’s a bit of relief in the chart of this New Moon. Mercury at 28 degrees of Libra is making a sweet, harmonious sextile (60-degree angle) with Venus in feisty Sagittarius. There may be sparks flying in communications with loved ones, but they likely will be polite and diplomatic, and the parties will be the better for it.
There’s a very wide trine (an approximately 120-degree-plus aspect) between the Sun and Moon in Scorpio and the mysterious outer planet Neptune in its long, slow sojourn through dreamy Pisces.
At this New Moon, just days after observances of Samhain and the Day of the Dead, it may feel like there are still loose boundaries between the worlds of ordinary and non-ordinary reality. That’s good because those in-between nooks and crannies are really good places to grow, in silence, and in the dark.
Blessings for the New Moon in Scorpio, and for the darkening days.
~Sara
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