New Moon in Taurus
eye of Kholkikos, the sleepless dragon and ever-watchful Guardian of the Golden Fleece. personal piece, made with wool.
Today’s New Moon occurs at 7°47’ Taurus. Here live many creatures that are instinctually inclined to labor, be industrious, persevering and productive. Creatures that, in the ways they orient and organize themselves, naturally foreground a universal need for material security — but not in exclusive ways. Think of beavers and their building and food storage competencies. And consider how the Moon, the planet of giving and receiving care, is exalted in Taurus. The beaver’s inner drive to fell trees, haul logs and build dams makes it possible for so many other beings to meet their basic needs of clean water, food and shelter, a service that then ripples out into the wider circles of ecosystem.
When regarding the beaver’s ecological role and impact, I’m reminded that Taurus is Venus’ nocturnal home — and how the Night sect (Moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury) and Night consciousness really confronts us with our inherent relatedness, interdependence, vulnerability, multiplicity, mutuality and wave nature.
Taurus’ abundance and material security is rooted in nocturnal wisdom.
I feel the suffering of nocturnal beings (popularly known as, but limited by the label of, “the feminine”) — of our intrapsychic beavers, fish and sea-goats — as they second-guess their deeper instinctual natures and try to fix their big-toothy, scaled, slippery, watery ways into something safer, more predictable, containable and measurable to the laws and expectations of Day.
And I also feel the suffering of diurnal beings (popularly known as, but limited by the label of, “the masculine”), thirsting for their nocturnal other-half, for darkness and ensoulment — but bound to the climb and to triumph.
I feel how the western world’s Day-heavy ways has led to a technique-oriented astrological field that we keep trying to squeeze out direction and soul-meaning for our lives — without offering back our own playful re-creation and wild re-dreaming of and through the mythic body that birthed astrology.
It makes sense that we’re here. And also we can do things differently.
We can shift from tourists of the Skies to reverent stewards and custodians. And now, here we are in Taurus.
Taurus. This place where the ritual of clocking work hours has utterly changed the shape of our intra-psychic rivers — but also — a place where we can remember and become thought-partners with beavers, with these creatures who carry the wisdom of building and living in lodges when their pond freezes over, losing sense of all solar cues and then participating in another way of being, creating and experiencing creation according to their own internal clocks beyond the purview of the sun god.
Taurus. This nocturnal place where Dream, imagination, a free play of the mind and the senses, sensuality and sexuality can help guide us to a material abundance that is rooted in dynamism, diversity and exchange.
Taurus. A place where Time will be needed for healing, restoration, deep sharing and real relationship-tending.
How do we deeply nourish ourselves and each other, as things take time to change? And, likewise, as our nervous systems catch up to the changes that have already so rapidly unfolded? How do we find (and allow ourselves) pleasure and even delight in the slowness, in the in-between, amidst chaos and uncertainty? How do we become thought-partners with our stone, plant and animal kin, with more-than-human relations?
With Venus in Pisces stewarding the luminaries in Taurus while still within one degree of Saturn, a reckoning with long scales of Time is prominently featured in this New Moon — as well as our relationship to the Ocean, to these much larger, ancient forces of Nature, to the infinite ways of water and the absolutely essential wildness and mutability of the unbound Piscean imagination.
The stability and the fecundity of Taurus relies upon the play of Pisces.
Taurus needs its sweet sextile-friendship to the wild and watery place of Pisces if its creaturely inhabitants are to feel free and empowered to follow their instinctual urges, evolving and innovating with ecological changes, building in ways that spontaneously benefit diverse and resilient ecosystems.
In her essay “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”, Ursula K. Le Guin writes about our country’s disapproval, disregard of, contempt for fantasy. She speaks to the businessman’s attitude of what point is there to read fiction for fun (or do anything just for the sake of fun, play, pleasure) when there is no profit — be it financial, educational, social or towards self-improvement?
Even if we have re-valued play and pleasure in our lives, which I think many of us here have … how do we invest in it as not a luxury but a necessity to the human experience? How do we invest in foregrounding our imaginative and artistic parts, even while feeling trapped inside a capitalist machine that says we can’t afford to?
While this tension makes sense and I feel it terribly in my own system, my questioning is still becoming more and more anchored in — how can we not?
At this point, how can we not invest in fantasy?
How can we not invest in nourishing and growing up our ability to imagine?
Le Guin writes of how it’s not just necessary to play but to support, mature and discipline the human faculty of free play.
Free play is our key to liberating a wild diversity of instinctual intelligences — ancient yet reborn in new forms, hybridities and combinatorials — creatures that know something about how to clear out the old and dive into new rivers of world-building that flow easily around obstacles, yielding, adapting.
This is Venus conjunct Saturn in Pisces.
Le Guin writes about how there is more than a moral disapproval but a fundamental fear of fantasy because of where it might take us inside of our own selves. Genuine playfulness and sensuality will eventually lead us to deeper feeling. This deeper feeling or eros will illuminate all the places in our lives there is untruth.
A discipline of play, pleasure, eros and the imagination is what unstrings the old order of things.
She writes:
“So I arrive at my personal defense of the uses of the imagination, especially in fiction, and most especially in fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up; that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grownups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb …
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.” (emphasis added)
They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
Similar to how Le Guin talks about the uses of the imagination and how the light of truth carried in fantasy-writing will bear relentlessly upon places of untruth — Audre Lorde writes about the uses of the erotic and how our erotic capacity to feel satisfaction will reveal everywhere it is missing. She writes:
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide our destinies.”
Experiential astrology “encourages excellence”, as Audre Lorde uses this phrase —through intentional participation and cultivation of competencies in the imaginal, sensuous, aesthetic, instinctual, emotional, expressive, deep feeling realms and ways of being human. Through ritual art-making, song, movement, writing, silence and infinite other portals, we remember how to step gently and reverently into the Sky of a given moment.
Western astrology arises largely out of the Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian tradition, whose stories and myths were recorded by the literate (the privileged) at a moment in time where the goddess cults were being replaced by the cults of Zeus. As such, the keywords and interpretations that many astrologers and astrology students use to describe Zodiac signs and planets, have largely been recycled, over and over again, from that moment in consciousness — limiting our scope of felt-experience and self-perception to the tiny sandbox of the patriarchal imagination.
We’re called to build larger, multi-dimensional sandboxes for our consciousness to play in so that we can learn, grow up and become more responsible humans in the necessary ways — while remaining youthful and seeing through a child’s eyes. As Le Guin wrote above: “I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up; that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Experiential astrology can be this sandbox. It can be both a firm container and a source of celestial, mythic, poetic, artful, kinesthetic and sensuous food that offers, as Le Guin writes, “the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment” our imaginations can absorb. It can be a place where we truly engage in recreation — and with that word I’m really being reminded of the 5th house as the place of Venus’ joy. I’m thinking of how Le Guin defines play as “recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new” and of how Audre Lorde in her essay Uses of the Erotic, writes:
“For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.”
As a Taurus Sun in the 5th House, I am here for this recreation. I’m here for the inner child and for what emotional digestion is possible in the context of play — recombining known ideas into new hybridities and ways of feeling them. I’m here for what recreation is possible as we expand our capacity to experience awe, wonder, delight and pleasure. I’m here to support myself and others in being more spontaneously moved by, and in collaboration with, the archetypal field.
As a Jupiter in Aquarius in the 2nd House, I get to trust in and be confident (Jupiter) that the rich, dense, elaborate field of astrology (Aquarius) can move us in ways that assist simultaneous but differentiated discoveries around resourcing ourselves beyond the limits of the capitalist or materialist imagination. And in this celestial sandbox of play, symbols can emerge from our own depths, which not only quench our soul but offer back to the mythic field. There is organic reciprocity here.
In experiential astrology, we don’t just orient ourselves around “what we might get out of” the story or the astrology. There is an active relating and embedding ourselves into the Sky, through our experience here on Earth. Once the circle is drawn (once the reading has been scheduled; once the workshop has started), the symbols begin to speak through us and around us. The more we make ourselves available to perceive and take shapes that the symbols invite us into, the more we both give and receive from the field of Story. It asks both of us — as the client and the astrologer, the querent and the oracle, the participant and the facilitator— to hang out for a while together in the not-knowing, the dilemma or the question as we respectfully enter relationship with and become familiar to the land of a particular Sky,.
With respect to hanging out with the question or even the confusion, I’m looking at the North Node — the head of the dragon — in Pisces near Venus and Saturn. And I’m looking at Jupiter — the planet stewarding Pisces — in Gemini.
Jupiter in Gemini reminds us of the wisdom that arrives through confusion. Jupiter here invites us to stay inside the confusion. Confusion can be a guardian of something precious and essential.
I’m also looking at Hekate’s involvement in this New Moon. I don’t usually pull the asteroid Hekate up in my charts. But based on what I’ve been experiencing, I thought to include her in this moment. And … there she was, at home in Scorpio, sitting directly across the New Moon and T-square to the Mars-Pluto opposition. What a powerful position. Hekate is the Crone, the goddess of the Dark Moon and the crossroads. The wise place inside of ourselves that offers just enough of a glow to see our way through the dark, but not so much that would disturb our own night vision.
Hekate offers something precious in us, the protection and veil of uncertainty.
Also, as I’ve been integrating the recent entry of Neptune in Aries, my attention has kept moving to Kholkikos, the dragon who guarded the Golden Fleece and also to Madea, the witch, apprentice and devotee to Hekate. Madea was the one who assisted Jason in defeating the dragon and obtaining the fleece, which he needed to return home with in order to recover his throne.
In some versions, Jason puts the dragon to sleep with a potion made by Madea. In some versions, he slays the dragon. And, there is also imagery of him being swallowed by the dragon, and then being spit back out.
So, I’ve been sitting with this moment in myth and making art of the dragon Kholkikos as a way to spend time with the character. This process led me down a trail of breadcrumbs to this essay by Ursula K Le Guin — “Why are Americans afraid of Dragons?” — which inspired much of this newsletter and refreshed my own perception of the Venus-Saturn conjunction in Pisces.
This is experiential astrology. It can be solitary and self-prompted, it can be 1:1 in an astrology reading or it can be a group workshop or ceremony. But it is an invitation to tend relationship — to hang out with a planet, an aspect, a character, moment or place in myth — and then letting the archetypal world take you on a journey. That said, you do not have to say yes to everything the story or planet moves you to do. This practice is about cultivating a noticing of these action urges and what they feel like — as well as a noticing of your own system’s readiness and willingness — and then maybe following them, maybe not, but cultivating discernment around this choice. And this is a really important part of the maturation process of being able to play as an adult in a living universe.
So, returning to Jupiter in Gemini — what might your system need to feel willing, ready, safe enough and supported enough, to be swallowed by the dragon of confusion? What might we find in there? What might we come to know by allowing ourselves to actually inhabit that experience, which no amount of thinking, figuring, calculating or conceptualizing around, would be able to take us to?
I’d offer astrology is a really powerful way to feel held by many circles of holding so that we can relax and become more like water — yielding to even confusion — becoming more wild, fluid and changeable in our personalities — potentially swallowed by the dragon of mutability — or be in some otherwise yet-to-be-imagined relationship with it — breaking out of the ways our Sun-Moon-Rising signs have been traditionally described — as Jupiter continues traveling through Gemini, while stewarding the North Node in Pisces.
Book your experiential astrology reading today :)
in the spirit and discipline of free play,
Nicole
