The first Full Moon of 2025 will perfect on January 13 at 2:26 pm. Pacific time at 25 Cancer. The moniker for this lunation in January is the Wolf Moon. Mid-winter, there’s a sense of barrenness. The Earth is crying, with fire and ice.
The Moon passes through its home sign of Cancer for a couple of days every month of the year. But only when the Sun is in the opposite sign of Capricorn is a Cancer Moon fully illuminated. This makes the Cancer Full Moon particularly potent, symbolically, for devotees of the Moon to imbibe.
Cancer is the cardinal water sign. Its totems are watery creatures, soft on the inside and with a self-protective hard shell, like turtles and crabs. Cancerians are often typecast as shy and introverted, which is largely true. We (I’m one of them) focus on safety and will take necessary action to create security and to preserve it. Cancerian themes include nostalgia for the past, longing for family ties, and cozy homes. A mother hen might be another totem animal for the Cancer archetype.
On January 13, the Moon will be moving toward a conjunction with Mars, now in Cancer, too. Mars is in the midst of one of its biennial retrograde periods, having moved backward from Leo into Cancer on January 6. Mars will move directly starting February 23 and will enter Leo again on April 18. Mars’ energy is fierce, making it not so comfortable in the sign of Cancer—unless there’s a mission to be accomplished or something vitally in need of protection. Mars’ passage through Cancer is an optimal time to focus on whatever one can do to bring safety and healing for oneself and others.
While Mars has been moving over the late degrees of Cancer and early degrees of Leo, it has been opposing Pluto, now in early Aquarius. A Mars/Pluto opposition manifests in ways that are potentially and sometimes literally explosive. In the United States, New Year’s Day saw two deadly public explosions. One, by a military vet, was a terrorist car attack on people celebrating in New Orleans. Across the country, another military vet exploded a Tesla car outside a Trump hotel. Such acts of public violence are shocks to our shared morality, the antithesis to care.
Gratefully, the January 13 lunation will feature some harmonious transiting aspects. Mars in Cancer (with the Moon following closely behind) will make a nearly exact water trine with Neptune, suggesting a merging of action and idealism, while the Sun in ambitious earth sign Capricorn will be sextile to Neptune, as if eager to start something altruistic.
At the same time, the Sun in Capricorn will make a nearly exact trine with Uranus, the planet of breakthroughs, disruptions, and surprises, while the Full Moon will be in an encouraging sextile with Uranus.
Together, these four harmonious aspects involving Neptune and Uranus—which are two of the outer, transpersonal planets—suggest possibilities for something radically sublime to unfold—though with Neptune and Uranus in play, there are also negative possibilities for delusional disruptions.
At the same time, Venus and Saturn, conjunct now in dreamy Pisces, are making a tense square to Jupiter in the mental/verbal sign of Gemini. Possibilities range from expanded thinking, to too much information (Gemini) or the loosening—even abandonment—of rules (Saturn in Pisces) about what passes for truth on the internet and in social media.
This whole coming year is like this: full of unknowns and pitfalls. Most years, one of the slower moving planets changes signs, and that’s momentous because the trajectories of the slower moving planets correlate with big changes in the collective atmosphere, for better or worse.
This year, there will be multiple new sign ingresses. Already the signs of the lunar nodal axis have changed to Virgo/Pisces. On March 30, Neptune will shift into Aries after being in Pisces since 2011. Saturn will join Neptune in Aries in June right about the time that Jupiter will move into Cancer, followed by Uranus’ ingress into Gemini on July 7. (I’ll write more about each of these transits in future posts.)
Each planetary sign change brings a change in the elements and modes involved. These multiple sign changes will be reflected in everyone’s personal lives and in collective events, impossible to predict. All one can say is that things will be unsettling. It’ll be necessary to hold on tight to whatever one has in life that is calm, predictable, and useful. The Full Moon in Cancer is a reminder to take care of oneself and others.
This reminds me of something from the worlds of Tibetan Buddhism, with its reliance on lineages. For centuries, in the Kagyu lineage, Tibetan Buddhists have looked to a “Karmapa,” who is a reincarnated spiritual leader tasked as “the one who carries out Buddha activity.” (There are unfortunately right now two beings considered to be the Karmapa, fueling conflict, which occurs even in spiritual communities.)
The Karmapa is said to operate with one eye looking out and one eye looking in, serving in worldly and spiritual realms simultaneously. This strikes me as an apt aspiration to hold right now: On the earth plane, acting to protect everything of value here; in the inner worlds, abiding in safety, as much as possible, from the suffering caused by other humans and the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. One eye looking out, and one eye looking in.
Blessings for the Cancer Full Moon!
~ 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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