Full Moon in Leo
Dear friends,
This is a long one, offering a lot of support for navigating the wilderness of this Full Moon in Leo. So, perhaps for ease of engagement … here is what’s included in this missive!
Introduction to this Full Moon
The mythosomatics of Twilight consciousness
The myth of Demeter & Persephone
Creative self-inquiry prompts for stepping into the field of Story
The Astrology of this Leo Moon
Creative self-inquiry prompts for re-dreaming of Demeter’s tale in context of the current astrology, as a warm-up to Venus Retrograde
Astrology readings to support the upcoming Venus Rx (March 1st-April 12th), with sliding scale options available.
Early Bird Registration for Living Astrologies Conference
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The Full Moon in Leo
This Full Moon in Leo takes us into the tale of the goddess Demeter, who is connected to the asteroid Ceres in our astrological sky.
I know Leo is generally associated with more colorful, exuberant self-expression, yet alongside that (and maybe directly supporting that) I invite you to also wander the landscape of Demeter’s myth with a posture that supports a friendliness to inner silence and solitude, as well as a multivalent receptivity to guidance and support. If this is a good moment for it, I invite you to drop in, subtly wiggle around and explore what that posture might be for you, right now.
Demeter’s story is one of descent and embodiment. Together with the Sun and Mercury, in the Fixed Air sign of Aquarius, there is the potential of accessing a cooler place of witnessing awareness within ourselves as we descend and encounter the more compelling emotional states, archetypal energies or god/desses that tend to overcome our core sense of Self, pulling us into a full role-play in the spotlight with them — a role-play that may or may not align with who we think we are.
But, looking at the overall astrology of the Full Moon (which I will get to below), I wouldn’t say that it’s the expectation that we should be able to prevent this enactment or emotional “acting out” (though reducing harm caused by such acting out is part of the goal). Rather, the intention can be that we maintain at least a modicum of witnessing presence — just enough — so that when the wave does pass, we can come out of it holistically learning about what else is here inside of us, what else is here in the relational field, the ways in which we are permeable and vulnerable, without knotting it in too tightly into our self-concept or making it about our goodness or badness. May we embrace our whole selves with more radical self-compassion as humans who are learning and remembering how to navigate the wilderness of Night in a society that’s largely resisted the dark, the ferality of body and eros, and Nature. May we continue shedding layers of perfectionism and attempts at invulnerability and impenetrability, so that something radically generous and creative can be shared through our willingness to be affected, to live and learn.
In this way, this Full Moon can be warm-up and resourcing of our upcoming descent (Venus Retrograde from Aries to Pisces, March 1st to April 12th), as Inanna travels into the underworld to witness deep grief and loss. While Demeter’s story describes an underworld journey that begins with an abduction, something that happens against our will — Inanna willingly goes down.
This Full Moon with Demeter (and with the various characters of her myth) may help us soften into the deep remembering of a time when humans were less walled off to the neurocomplex, to the non-human and more-than-human voices and agencies, to ungrieved ghosts, grief, rage, shame and the dark psychic life, to the un-settling forces that can potentially help rescue us from crusty self-concepts and back into the deeper breaths and fluidity of the Self.
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The mythosomatics of Twilight consciousness
When I look at the chart of this Full Moon and I see all the characters of Demeter’s myth together, present in the same “room” and engaged in conversation, I am reminded that — although the Story is told linearly to allow and invite in the sense-making and the participation of solar or Day consciousness (i.e. the rational mind, the separate individual, Kronos time, what allows us to say “I”) — behind the curtain, the Story is a forever feral, shape-shifting, unbound time-traveling creature. It appears to us in kaleidoscopic turnings that slip through and around Day’s concretizations, offering a multiplicity of portals into more ecological, relational, wild ways of knowing, moving, world-building.
As an astrologer, a child of Mercury and apprentice to Twilight consciousness, I strive to recognize both Night and Day as here, valuable and necessary for creating positive change, for weaving back and forth between the hemispheres, tending a kind of corpus callosum that supports the ways we can see, hear and embody love with the human and more-than-human world, in our day-to-day.
Through storytelling and offering a linear narrative that the mind can follow (let go and fall into…), we can support our conscious minds in moving closer to the wilder ecotone of Twilight where symbolic views of our lived experiences emerge on their own terms, organically linking into larger contexts and understandings. The voltage of emotional states can be stepped down, supporting a return to our core — and also, the volume of silenced emotions can be turned up, so we can hear finally their message. We can feel-sense-recognize who we are being, who is here with us, what age we are, where we tend to go from here. The animate field of Story moves us backward and forward and sideways through time. The narrative loops and it skips. We learn other ways of orienting than the ones we were given. Doors to new worlds open.
In this newsletter, we’ll begin with a linear telling of Demeter’s myth to let your mind ground. Then, we’ll pendulate into Night, with some prompts to invite you into the field of dreaming and creative re-memberings under this Full Moon in Leo (coinciding with a North Node and Neptune conjunction in Pisces). And then again, move back into Day, as we look at the chart of the current Sky.
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The Myth of Demeter and Persephone
While generally abiding in his place below, on a rare sojourn aboveground, Hades (our astrological Pluto) spots the beautiful Persephone — daughter of his brother Zeus and the goddess of grain, Demeter — and falls in love. He goes to Zeus on Mt. Olympus to ask for Persephone, in fulfillment of Zeus’ promise that he could marry one of his daughters.
While Zeus says yes, he also knows that Demeter would never agree. For, if it weren’t for her mother’s protection or deferrals, Persephone would already have been married. She had many suitors, including Apollo, Hermes and Hephaestus, and Demeter had turned away every one. Given that, it seemed impossible that she would consent to marrying her daughter to the Lord of the Underworld. Zeus and Hades together come up with another way.
On the following morning, Demeter leaves the maiden Persephone playing with sea nymphs in a field of flowers. The beauty of the narcissus pervades earth and heaven, even stopping hunting dogs in their tracks with the deliciousness of their aroma.
In this meadow, Zeus tells Gaia to grow a narcissus of such radiance — out of view of the nymphs but within sight of Persephone — that she’d be sure to follow its beauty away from the others’ protection. As Persephone bends to pick the flower of exquisite perfection, a fissure in the ground opens up revealing Hades who grabs and pulls the maiden down.
One nymph sees the abduction and attempts to rescue Persephone. But she is of course no match for the Lord of the Underworld. In a pool of tears and great grief, she melts, becoming the river Sion.
As she goes, Persephone cries out, but no one seems to hear her — except two beings: the goddess of the Night, of witches and crossroads, Hecate, and the distant all-seeing sun-god Helios.
Eventually, Demeter does hear her too. Rushing to the scene, she arrives too late, her daughter is gone. Nobody can help her or tell her what happened. In a rage, she curses the nymphs, turning them into the scaly footed, bird-shaped Sirens. She howls at the sight of Persephone’s belt that washes up on the banks of the river Sion and begins desperately wandering the earth, in search of her lost daughter.
In her wanderings, she comes upon Hecate and begs her for information.
Hecate responds, “I didn’t see it, but I heard her cries.” The witch has a sense of what has passed, she takes Demeter to Helios to tell what happened.
Helios, the distant all-seeing sun-god, tells that Persephone has been taken by Hades into the underworld. Overcome by grief, Demeter descends to the human world, taking up a mortal form. As an old servant-woman named Doso, she goes to Metaneira, Queen of Eleusis, and asks to take care of her son Demophöon. As a kind of bargaining or re-negotiation of her own deep loss, Demeter attempts to make the human child Demophöon immortal by placing him in a fire every night to burn off his mortality.
Metaneira walks in on her one day and, horrified, stops her. Again, in utter rage and fury with Metaneira for interrupting her dreams, Demeter sheds her human identity, reveals herself as the great goddess she is, leaves and demands a temple to be built for her in Eleusis. There, she truly drops into grief and the world goes into famine.
Upon hearing the suffering of humanity as well as the discontent of the gods in not receiving their usual offerings from the humans, Zeus intervenes and sends Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone home to her mother.
But when Hermes arrives in the underworld, they don’t find a distraught daughter pining for her old life or reunion with her mother — Hermes finds a radiant queen. She is in an unexpected place of power, opened up amidst the gardens that Hades built for her, in a role alongside her husband as one who assists the spirits of the dead to cross over. Persephone was conflicted about her return to life above.
Hades, afraid that his beloved would choose her mother over him, offers Persephone pomegranate seeds to eat — which she does. And, as all know, if you eat the food of the underworld, you can never fully leave. Persephone would spend half the year above ground with her mother and half the year below, with her husband.
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Self-reflection prompts:
In this moment with the story, where does your attention naturally go? What place in the story feels most alive or carries the most juice?
What character resonates most with where you are? What character do you feel yourself playing the role of?
What people or places in your life do you perceive playing the other characters for you?
What characters do you resist or judge? What character do you feel least in touch with?
What details in the story do you find yourself wanting to know more about?
Whose perspective do you want to hear more from?
Who would you want to have a conversation with?
Activities for stepping into the field:
Choose a character to invite into conversation. This could be a major character (e.g. Demeter, Persephone or Zeus) or it could be a minor character (e.g. the sea nymph turned river Sion). If it helps with loosening up, you can write down the answers that come with your non-dominant hand. Example questions to this character can include:
How do you feel about the way you’ve been portrayed in this story?
What about your story is missed?
What else would you have me see or know?
((What else are you wanting to ask this person?))
Writing as the character (although I would imagine this more as “co-consciousness” with the character — not a full identification as them, but more so like you’re inviting them to sit here close to you so you can hear something softly spoken and translating)
Begin a series of sentences that begin with “I remember …” Even if you don’t rationally understand how the endings to the sentences are relevant, just let them come through and keep writing without stopping for 3-5 minutes (or more).
Make a collage. Sit with the images, sensations, memories, desires etc. that arise in response to this myth and collect images that resonate with what’s coming up. What new insights or fresh perspectives of the story emerge? Who is speaking through the collage? What do you see or know that you did not before? Make notes in your journal about what comes through.
Invite your body to move and dance out a moment in the myth. What new insights or fresh perspectives of the story emerge? Who is speaking though your movements? What do you see or know that you did not before? Make notes in your journal about what comes through.
When complete with any of the above exercises, do some grounding and centering practice that restores the space between you and the character that you’ve just been with — a space that supports your sense of clarity, core Self and full internal ecosystem — as well as the ability to relate with this character as you move forward, holding the vision of their own Self-led person and multi-faceted nature, too.
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The Chart of the Full Moon & Prompts for dreaming/re-dreaming
Now — pendulating back to the chart of the Full Moon — we see the myth in its non-linear and multi-textured complexity.
Pluto and Persephone are 4 degrees from each other, both in the early degrees of Aquarius. This conjunction may reflect Persephone’s time with her husband as Queen of the Underworld. And, as this union is animated within and by the living landscape of Aquarius — the Water-bearer, the Idealist, revolutionary, rebel, humanitarian, genius, scientist, outcast, fugitive, exile — I see these different facets of Aquarius intelligence are assisting a long, deep process of composting, death and rebirth, shadow work and alchemy.
Where is Aquarius in your chart? What house and life topics does it correspond to?
How are you currently imagining, experiencing and relating to Pluto and Persephone’s union in this place of your life? How does it feel to be Persephone here? How is Aquarius energy and themes woven into it?
Persephone is in a sextile to Venus in Aries. The Queen of the Underworld is positioned to clearly transmit an invitation or a “heads-up” to Venus that her time to descend is coming soon, as she approaches her retrograde in Aries to Pisces, linking this Full Moon to that journey (March 1st to April 12th). Venus in Aries is in her detriment, facing challenges and potentially coming up with more innovative ways to access and enjoy pleasure, self-worth, money, resources, softness, sensuality, sexuality, relationship. The perceptual stance of Aries tends to err on the side of assuming the other person isn’t on your team, unless they explicitly tell or show you that they are. So that’s something that may be worked out here and during this journey.
Where is Aries in your chart? What house and life topics does it correspond to?
What emotional fissures exist in this place? Who might be an inner or outer ally and guide for dropping in and navigating darkness here?
What places in you feel willing to go on this journey?
What places in you feel resistant? What do they need to access a felt-sense of safety and receptivity to support?
Hecate is conjunct Vesta in Scorpio. Hecate — the Crone, the luminescent scorpion that glows with an inner light subtle enough to preserve your own Night vision* — enters the temple of Vesta. What happens here, I am not sure. Does the Crone become still and quiet? Is she unavailable to Demeter for a moment — not there to take her to Helios, that bright light of conscious insight? Are some sources of learning meant to remain in the dark, protected from the more solar, heroic ways of sense-making and response? Is it inevitable that there is some deeper, older re-enactment(s) that are coming through? What sacred space and ritual can hold us through these enactments, reducing and preventing harm while opening up space for experiential learning? Is Vesta centering us and calling us Home through coming un-done? Through the ways of the goddess of the crossroads? Are we tending our inner spark through the art of ritual, the magic of crafting with the natural world, the subtle senses of the huntress attuning with the creature(s) she follows?
Where is Scorpio in your chart? What house and life topics does it correspond to?
What (simple, accessible, resonant) ritual would support you in deeply loving and staying with yourself as you track what’s moving through your inner wilderness? As you meet creatures of shame, anger, fear, desire …
What nourishes your capacity to discern the level of proximity, intimacy and boundary you need here, moment by moment?
What or who helps you return to Self if/when you’re displaced by bigger energies?
What or who helps deepen the pathways home?
The Sun, Ceres and Mercury are conjoined in Aquarius. While Hecate may not be available to bring Demeter to Helios, Mercury seems very available to offer their ways of guidance as “Herald and Protector of Travelers”.** I feel Mercury here in the writing of this missive — stimulating complexity and apparent contradiction, announcing to the psyche the presence of these archetypal energies, offering ways to symbolize, to link parts and to step up or down the voltage of the gods or more intense emotional states that may come with this dramatic Full Moon in Leo.**
Again, consider where Aquarius is in your chart. How might this place be supported and influenced by the magic and mischief of Mercury?
If you’re feeling extra-limber in your contemplations — Imagine for a moment that Ceres (Ceres is the Roman unfolding of Demeter) is a kind of seed that’s planted in the soil of Aquarius. This seed can unfurl into the hologram of Demeter’s story. But, when the story unfurls, it shows the additional texture and personality that it’s gained from the environmental information and materials of Aquarius — a mythic landscape that also involves kind of similar split between innocence and everlasting beauty (Ganymede — the Uranus rulership of Aquarius) & the limits and imperfections of material reality (Tros — the Saturn rulership of Aquarius). I wonder if Ceres/Demeter here helps titrate in some of Tros’ grief over the loss of his son, and helps Ganymede grieve the loss of his own incarnation, and through this descent, bridge the two archetypal pathways within you in ways that lets something new, never-before-seen, come into the world.
Uranus in Taurus is in a T-square with the Sun & Moon. Uranus can be a Metaneira figure (her name can be read as “meta”=interrupt and “neira”=dream), interrupting the dream or fantasy of being able to protect ourselves against our human desires, sexual nature, vulnerability, permeability, aging, mortality.
Where is Taurus in your chart? What house and life topics does it correspond to?
What labyrinth have you been walking here?
What animal wisdom lives there that you’ve learned to keep hidden or away from the world? If these protective mechanisms were not available, what or who else helps nourish your nervous system and support you in accessing a felt-sense of safety?
What are you afraid of being judged or seen as, if you gave yourself permission to acknowledge the many voices of the inner and outer creaturely world, as real — and allowed them to guide, inform or collaborate with you? What nourishes and supports your nervous system in the face of any fears that come up around that?
Well, that was a lot! May you find some part of it nourishing and enriching to your journeying through this time in the world. As always, I’d love to hear about your findings and revelations and curiosities, feel free to email me with what arises.
*Night Vision — when I say “night vision”, I’m pointing to the capacity to see relational webs, attractor patterns, co-emergences, hidden agendas, what’s suppressed or repressed, ghosts, surplus realities, more-than-human agencies …
**This description of Mercury as “Herald and Protector of Travelers” and his various astrologically reflected “actions”, was presented in Jason Holley’s webinar Deep Mercury, Hermes and the Quickener of Destinies — highly recommend!
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Venus Retrograde from Aries to Pisces (March 1st to April 12th)
I hope this Full Moon does help resource us, connecting us to our source of creative energies and inextinguishable inner spark, in ways that are both co-liberatory and also supportive of the more deeply interior and intimate journeying of Venus as she stations retrograde.
It’s not advised to take underworld journeys without a guide, because it’s easy to forget ourselves. May we all have people, places and ways to remind us of who we are, over the next six weeks. If you are called to astrological support and myself as your astrologer, our reading can focus on supporting your Venus Rx journey. You can book a 60-minute or 90-minute session here, with sliding scale options available. And if you’ve received a reading within the last 15 months, use this link for a follow-up!
