Full Moon Lunar Eclipse at 4°53′ Pisces

Full Moons bring out the worst in astrology writing. The Moon gets bright and suddenly everyone knows what your soul is doing. Karma is complete, timelines are shifting, old contracts are expiring, ancestors are hovering nearby with instructions, and the universe is apparently rearranging the furniture on your behalf. Add an eclipse and all hell breaks loose.

I get snarky because I don’t know how anybody knows any of that.

A Full Moon, to me, is already interesting without the embellishment. Something has become obvious. That’s enough. Obvious does not mean explained, and it certainly does not mean cosmically ordained. It just means there is enough light on something now that it is getting harder to pretend you can’t see it.

This one is particularly good because the Sabian symbols are so gloriously unhelpful if what you want is a tidy spiritual proclamation. The eclipsed Moon is at Pisces 5, A Church Bazaar. The Sun is opposite at Virgo 5, A Man Dreaming of Fairies. Uranus, almost exactly square both, is at Gemini 6, Drilling for Oil.

So there we are. A fairy, a church bazaar and an oil rig.

The man dreaming of fairies is having an experience that may be strange, meaningful, ridiculous, perceptive, imaginative, or some combination nobody has a good word for yet. The symbol doesn’t settle it. That’s what I like about it. I used Findhorn when I wrote about this degree because it has the same awkwardness. Eileen Caddy heard an inner voice. Dorothy Maclean believed she was communicating with plant intelligences. Then the garden grew rather astonishingly well. I have already written about that elsewhere, so I’m not hauling everybody back through the whole story. The useful bit here is that the experience was odd, the explanation was arguable, and reality did not behave quite neatly enough to make either the believers or the sceptics completely comfortable.

Across from that sits the church bazaar, which is about as funny a Pisces image as Elsie Wheeler could have come up with. Forget the veil between worlds. Somebody has made jam.

A church bazaar is full of people bringing things, buying things, helping out, showing off a little, being generous, being competitive, gossiping, admiring each other’s baking and keeping a sideways eye on who sold out first. Nobody is pure. Nobody has checked their ego at the door. And yet something communal happens anyway.

That matters beside the fairy because the dreamer is not floating alone in space. Whatever we think we know eventually has to live among other people. Other people respond to us. They misunderstand us. They see things we miss. They reinforce our stupidity. They occasionally save us from it. A roomful of people can be wrong just as easily as one person can, but the room changes the picture.

Then Uranus turns up at Gemini 6, Drilling for Oil, and this is where I start laughing.

Drilling for oil begins with evidence. There are geological reasons to think something might be down there. Nobody spends that kind of money because they made a vision board. But eventually somebody has to put a hole in the ground, because “it looks promising” and “there is oil” are not the same statement.

I know that symbol rather intimately because I once worked around people who actually drilled for oil. I have written that story elsewhere too, and I’m not repeating myself. What stayed with me was how much expertise could go into a decision and how cheerfully the ground could still say no.

That is what makes Uranus interesting here. I am less interested in “The Great Awakener” than I am in the thing that screws up the explanation. The odd fact. The anomaly. The piece that refuses to fit. Sometimes it changes the whole picture. Sometimes it turns out to be nothing. Sometimes everybody has to sit there for a while admitting that something happened and nobody quite knows what to do with it.

Which brings us back to the Full Moon. Something may become obvious without becoming simple.

There is a real-life story I found that catches the pattern rather nicely. Thomas Arnestad had spent years doing property photography and had become bored out of his skull. Nothing dramatic had happened. He simply had this persistent sense that there ought to be something else. Then he complained to his wife that nobody ever asked him about his work, and she pointed out that people did ask; he just answered by telling them how bored he was.

That is such a good Full Moon story because nothing mystical happened. His own situation was reflected back to him by another person and suddenly there it was, embarrassingly obvious.

Later, over lunch, he got talking to people from another company. They described the sort of person they needed and he realized they were more or less describing him. After that, he tried things. Different work, other possibilities, even part-time personal-care work because he wanted to know whether something more human would suit him.

That little story contains all three symbols without needing any incense. The fairy is the persistent sense of another possibility. The bazaar is ordinary contact with other people, where something becomes easier to see. The drilling is what happens when possibility stops being a fantasy and meets something that can answer back.

And that is where the usual Full Moon writing starts to irritate me. Somebody realizes the relationship is dead and within two paragraphs it has become a karmic contract reaching completion. Somebody hates their job and suddenly their soul is changing timelines. Somebody has a vivid dream and the ancestors are on the phone.

Maybe. But that is a lot of extra information.

Sometimes “I don’t want to marry him” is already a fairly substantial revelation.

Sometimes “I hate this job” will do.

Sometimes the dream is just interesting.

Sometimes the anomaly is the whole story for now.

That is also why the theme song for this eclipse is “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush. Wilhelm Reich had an outrageous idea, built equipment around it and went out into the world to see what happened. I have covered Reich and cloudbusting elsewhere and I am not reopening that entire filing cabinet here. What I love is the same awkward territory again: something strange is imagined, something physical is attempted, things happen, and people continue arguing about what those things mean.

So that is where I end up with this Full Moon: a man dreaming of fairies, people selling pie in a church basement, somebody drilling a very expensive hole in the ground, and Uranus making sure there is at least one thing in the picture nobody can explain away quite as neatly as they would like.

Something is obvious.

The explanation may still be bullshit.