This year’s New Moon in Sagittarius is attending the holiday parties, but isn’t feeling the love. A tough aspect to the sign’s ruling planet, Jupiter, and the looming presence of Saturn highlight the challenges inherent in the Centaur’s sign, suggesting that its fun-loving, adventurous side will be pushed aside by a need to create order through laying down the law, and far-seeing, heartfelt faith may be twisted into narrow dogma.

This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the parties but you’ll want to pay attention to the beliefs and attitudes that underlie what’s going on in the world around you. Our beliefs shape our lives and experience, our communal beliefs shape our world, and clashing beliefs cause most of our collective pain. A lot of people aren’t sure what they believe, which means they aren’t sure what they should be doing — so they do nothing.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.”
― Bob Marley

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich

The chart of the Autumn Equinox will resonate until sometime around the Winter Solstice. The equinoxes are always points of balance, and this chart emphasizes that we are at a tipping point — globally, nationally, locally and personally. Change is in the air, and decisions we make now will have long-term repercussions. Fortunately, this chart offers much-needed inspiration, energy and opportunities to improve our connections with others. We are heading into a challenging Winter — but we will be given the opportunities and wherewithal to make a difference. Thoughtful, skilled use of the cosmic tides of energy and change will help us steer ourselves and our world toward a better future.

I expect that most of my readers do magic, meditate, pray, or have some spiritual practice they engage in regularly. There’s plenty of energy to light a fire under your practice in this chart, and I hope you will use it, because the world needs all the positive vibes we can send it right now. There are deeply destructive forces — patterns of thought and emotion — that have woven themselves tightly into the fabric of our culture, and it will require clear, focused work on the energetic/astral/magical levels by those who are capable of it to unravel and re-weave ourselves into a strong, sustainable, global society.

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."  ~ Thomas Merton

The August New Moon, in fun-loving, generous, heart- (and sometimes self-) centered Leo, forms a threesome with Venus, planet of relationships. This configuration tends to turn astrologer’s minds to hearts and flowers and “Love Is in the Air” . But a closer look at the chart reveals that you won’t be able to get away with a saccharine and shallow approach to relationships this month. (Though by all means, feel free to drag out the disco music. Someday I’ll do an astrological study of the disco scene in the 70s and will, I have no doubt, find a prominent Leo signature in the charts).

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ~ Walt Whitman

Astrologers call the chart of the Summer Solstice the “Cancer ingress chart”, and it is one of four cardinal ingress charts we look at every year. These charts mark powerful times in the turning of the cosmic wheel — when Sun enters zero degrees of one of the four signs in the cardinal modality  — and are considered predictive for anytime from 3 months to one year ahead, depending on technicalities I won’t bore you with. Personally, I see all these predictive charts as successive waves of influence, and so, for instance, the waves of the latest New Moon chart, of the last Lunar Eclipse, of the recent Solar Eclipse and Aries ingress chart, are all breaking on or close to shore right now, creating patterns in the shifting, tide-washed sands of our personal lives and our society.

A book I’m reading got me thinking recently about some of the deeper issues of the current, ongoing Mercury-Neptune square, as Mercury has been retrograding over the degrees of the aspect, dragging out what is usually a very short encounter.  The square aspect generally presents as what a friend of mine called A FOG — Another Freakin’ Opportunity for Growth. (It’s never easy, might be painful.) Both arms of the square have ideas and approaches to problems that must be brought together into a workable synthesis, ‘cause nobody’s backing out of this fight.

Full Moons always set the stage for the next couple of weeks, and in upcoming Full Moon chart (June 2, 12:20 PM ET) Mercury, the planet of the Trickster God, rules from a throne sitting right at the top of the chart cast for Washington DC (predictive for the entire US) Yes, Mercury is retrograde, too, making the Trickster even trickier to handle, bringing out his sense of slapstick humor (we don’t always find it funny) and offering us some clever puzzles to work on in the first half of June.

Looking Within

The first puzzle that we are presented with is the enigma of ego. As individual nodes of creative life force currently functioning from the home base of a body, we develop an ego as part of the maturation process. We identify with something we call me, myself or I. It’s a necessary and — if properly nurtured and balanced — healthy part of the human psyche. But many religions and spiritual philosophies tell us to renounce, or at least keep a tight rein on our egos — and their definitions of just what the ego is vary.

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult." – E.B. White

Full Moon charts are generally said to be in effect only for the two weeks until the next New Moon. But a chart is a single moment in time on the restless sea of planetary movements - a moment that lets us get a reading on where we’re heading, and make any necessary course corrections Used wisely, the course that is set in that moment can influence our lives far beyond the next couple of weeks.