The Moon will reach its new phase with the Sun at 22 degrees of Virgo on September 14 at 6:40 p.m. on the West Coast.
I marvel, every year at this time, at how neatly Virgo season coincides with the beginning of the school year. After Leo season, the party’s over and it’s time to knuckle down and pay attention. But there’s much more to Virgo than that.
Virgo’s our mutable earth sign. It’s of the yin, or inwardly drawn polarity. Its symbol is a harvest maiden. With autumn on its way, Virgo is the discriminating wisdom one needs to separate wheat from chaff.
From pop astrology, we get the stereotype of Virgo personalities as tight-lipped critics, ready with red pencils to edit everyone’s work. Any caricature has some semblance with reality. But Virgo’s drive isn’t so much to nit-pick as it is to do things well and improve them, for their own sake and because Virgo is about service, apprenticing and mentoring. Teachers and students are both in the business of skill-building.
I’m now thinking that a key word for Virgo is competence. With noble intentions, wanting to do things by-the-book helps to create safety for everyone involved. The highest aim of Virgo is to be and act plainly, unadulterated, like a bar of pure castile soap that has a simple purpose.
The Virgo New Moon and the days following it are excellent for setting in motion a new service project, learning a new skill, or starting a new health habit. “Practice makes perfect,” is a Virgoan mantra, though there’s really no end-point to the idea of perfection. In fact, for Virgo, there can be self-doubt about ever knowing, doing, and being “enough.”
At any lunation, there’s always something else going on in the sky. On September 14, Virgo’s ruling plant Mercury (also now in Virgo) will be stationing to move forward after a recent period of retrogradation. A stationary planet is potent in its significations. Mercury represents our processes of collecting, processing, and sharing information.
The closest aspect of the September 14 lunation is the harmonious trine the Sun and Moon are making with outer planet Uranus, in Taurus. When planets are making a trine, an approximately 120-degree aspect with each other, they’re in the same element. This trine is in the element of earth.
Uranus is a force of unexpected, even shocking, events. Uranus is also associated with individuation, a necessary process in becoming a mature adult, let alone spiritually adept. If Uranus were a person, he or she would be an iconoclast, smashing down idols and cutting through ossified ways of being. If you think of Uranus as liberation and the Virgo Sun/Moon, and Mercury as all about competence, there’s a call now to skillfully renew and refine one’s spiritual path You might use the fresh energy of the September 14 New Moon to rededicate yourself, for example, to practices of meditation that are grounding and realistic.
The September 14 New Moon precedes, by a few days, the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah, followed by the ten Days of Awe that end with Yom Kippur, a time to take vows for self and collective improvement in the coming year.
All of this is facilitated by the fact that Pluto, in the last couple of degrees of steadfast Capricorn, is widely trine to Uranus in Taurus and the Virgo New Moon. That means that Pluto, Uranus, and the New Moon are forming a Grand Trine in the element of earth. A trine, like the word triangle, is an aspect of stability. In the earth signs of Virgo, Taurus, and Capricorn, this Grand Trine is rock steady.
This is a time to attune oneself to what mystics have called the ground of being. It’s not so much the Divine One in her/his/their transcendent realms, untouchable. It’s more like having one’s feet planted firmly on blades of grass and clumps of dirt, on this green earth right here and now.
Blessings for the Virgo New Moon and L’Shanah Tova!
~ Sara
Sara R. Diamond, an astrologer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is a life-long student and practitioner in several esoteric paths. Her style of astrology combines modern-psychological astrology with insights from traditional astrology. Sara is also an estate planning attorney. In addition, she has published four books on right-wing movements in the United States and earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. You are invited to contact Sara via her website at www.SaraDiamondAstrology.com.
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