By Kairos
We are all feeling the uncertainty of an unprecedented global lockdown. If you're an empath or highly sensitive person, you're also likely feeling the waves of panic and anxiety that are rolling through the collective consciousness.
Phoenix and I were feeling it all day yesterday and based on social media posts and my conversations with other community members, so were many of you.
Astrology gives us a symbolic language for understanding the nature of any given moment in time. Some moments are short, some last for many years. One of astrology's great gifts is that it empowers us to tune in to both the symbolic content of the moment -- and how long that energy is likely to last.
Knowing there's an underlying reason for what we are experiencing, and that the current energetic will eventually transform into something else enables us to use the moment wisely. Rather than (for example) running around screaming that the sky is falling, being overwhelmed by mass hysteria, or hoarding all the toilet paper from the local grocery store.
In the chart below, I've taken the USA's birth chart and added the placements of the transiting Moon, Nodes, Chiron and Black Moon Lilith from yesterday (March 16, 2020 - 8:12 pm EDT, Washington DC).
What Are We Feeling? The Transiting Moon
Moments shown by the transiting Moon are of short duration. The Moon moves about 13 degrees per day, so any aspect of the Moon to a natal chart is going to illuminate the native's feelings, sense of security, instinctual responses and so forth - but only for a few hours (with the notable exception of eclipses and new and full moons, but that's a whole 'nother story).
The feelings and unconscious responses evoked by the transiting Moon are strongest in the hours leading up to the exact aspect(s). Yesterday's transiting Moon in Capricorn was building to a conjunction with the South Node (karma, patterning from the past) and opposition to the North Node (evolutionary path, destiny) that culminated at 8:12 pm Eastern time.
This aspect was also part of a bigger aspect pattern: a T-square among the Nodes and transiting Chiron and Black Moon Lilith. That aspect - slightly longer moment in time - has been in place since the middle of January and will start to transform after the Aries New Moon on March 24.
This is one way the transiting Moon functions in astrology: it tunes us in emotionally to bigger cycles that have been running in the background. Although we feel these cycles on some level, we are often not consciously aware of their meaning or aware of our own feelings about them until the Moon's gravitational pull brings them up from the unconscious.
OK, so what can this chart tell us about what we're experiencing and how we can respond to it consciously? Let's start with yesterday's Moon and work out to some larger cycles / longer moments.
Moon Transiting Capricorn: Systems Fail & How We Feel
The Moon in Capricorn activates another set of cycles today (Wednesday, March 18) as it conjuncts transiting Jupiter, Pluto and Saturn and opposes the USA's Mercury. So after something of an emotional respite yesterday, you can be interested in the themes that surface today.
The Moon and South Node were conjunct yesterday in Capricorn, in the USA's first house of self and identity. The South Node activates energies from the past/unconscious. Capricorn symbolizes structure, authority, and systems - including the big societal structures that allow daily life to happen in a more or less orderly, continuous fashion. Think: education, health care, power grid, water lines, transportation, financial systems.
The coronavirus panic ramping up in the USA the last few days has illuminated one of the key themes of transiting South Node in Capricorn: the fact that many of our big systems are in a rather shocking state of disrepair. Of course, we all know this. We know that tens of millions of Americans live below the poverty line. We know that tens of millions of us have insufficient or no health insurance. We know that our educational system is failing millions of our children. We know that many children all across our nation have almost no food security.
I could go on and on, but the point is: we all know these things. Yesterday's Moon-Nodes-Chiron-Lilith T-square didn't create the decades of neglect and abuse of power that caused these systems to fall into disrepair; it (along with the coronavirus pandemic) is just forcing us to confront our feelings.
The 1st House symbolizes our sense of self - in this case, who we are as a nation. So much of what we are feeling in the collective revolves around our individual and collective sense of self. The hysteria we've seen around COVID-19 has certainly been fanned into a raging wildfire of fear by the news media which has already generated more than 1 billion mentions of COVID-19, more than all other recent global pandemics combined.
But, like a virus, much of the fear is spread from person to person. Almost all of this fear-spreading is egoic and self-centered. The thinking seems to be: "If I don't act really concerned about this (and pretend to care about 'our most vulnerable community members'), I will look like a bad person if it really is as serious as they say."
Or, straight up hoarding dressed up as virtue: "I'm going to buy ten times as much Lysol and toilet paper as my family could possibly use in two weeks, in case this thing goes on for a while." (What about the people who didn't get to the store as fast as you? "Well, it's their fault! If they cared as much about keeping their families safe as I do, they wouldn't find themselves in this predicament.")
Of course, the USA has a well-deserved reputation around the globe as a childish society full of people who are only interested in getting what we can for ourselves, regardless of who gets hurt in the process.
So, yes, America: this is a wake-up call.
Chiron and Black Moon Lilith T-Square the Nodes
This cycle is an intensification of transiting Chiron conjunct the USA's nadir, or 4th House cusp. Chiron has been activating this angle of the USA's chart for the last two years and made his last exact transit in late January.
The nadir or imum coeli (IC) symbolizes our national roots, our sense of security, our home life and our energetic or spiritual foundations.
At the end of January, Black Moon Lilith entered Aries and formed a conjunction with Chiron just as the Nodes were moving into the current T-square aspect. This intense configuration has been in place for the past seven weeks and is just now beginning to break apart.
Chiron, "the wounded healer," is an incredibly potent archetype for modern times. Chiron always brings into play the divide between our rational mind and our mammalian instincts. So many people in the USA are seriously disconnected from their bodies, their natural instincts toward health and pleasure, and the realms of Nature.
These people live almost entirely in their heads, in an artificially constructed world that is curated by the corporate-owned news media. This disembodied mentality is a purposeful creation of the entities that control the media and is a result of many decades of research and experimentation on the world's television-watching population to determine the most effective ways of achieving mind control over the populace. (Television is an inherently hypnotic medium by virtue of the rate at which the images flicker on the screen.)
Chiron is a savior archetype very much akin to Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humanity. Chiron saves us by making us aware of our suffering and then offering us the means to heal ourselves. Chiron in Aries focuses our awareness on how the Self has been invalidated, bringing to the forefront all the ways we have learned:
that we are inherently sinful, burdensome, or inadequate;
not to trust our instincts;
that we must suppress our animal courage and valor so as not to offend those around us who are too afraid;
that we must be able to justify, defend and rationalize what our hearts desire.
Of course, continually repressing our instincts and desires - damming up our energy flow - results in all sorts of negative outcomes such as destructive addictions to food, alcohol and narcotics, chronic pain and disease, and the sort of resentment that justifies taking more than we need because we have the power to do so.
So it's interesting that - just in time for this current set of transits - Americans have been told to stay in their homes.
(I find it especially fascinating that the presumed need for people to stop going to schools, places of work, and restaurants has been translated into the directive to "stay at home." Avoiding close contact with other humans and staying inside your house are two very different concepts.)
How did the concepts of social distancing and self-isolation (two of the plethora of Orwellian terms suddenly bouncing around the Web like beach balls at a Nickelback concert) morph into "we must all stay inside our homes?"
You don't contract the coronavirus from trees or clouds or the ground. And even Western science knows that sunlight and fresh air are two of the most potent antiviral forces available.
Perhaps this is some astrological spell perpetrated by Chiron and Lilith to force us to look at the deep trauma that almost all of us in this country have sustained at home / as part of a family?
The wounding of the Self that all children in our society suffer as a result of trauma, toxic shame, and outright abuse within the family system is the real pandemic in our society. Perhaps a few months of semi-voluntary house arrest are just the medicine that will enable us to find the courage to confront and heal this trauma.
Black Moon Lilith is the wild card in this picture. Lilith symbolizes the way our creative, nurturing, and communal self (our so-called feminine side) has been wounded by the patriarchal system of the world.
Like Chiron, Lilith in Aries shows us how the Self was wounded by the abuse, oppression, authoritarianism, greed, and selfishness of our parents and elders - and by extension, our corporate overlords and government officials.
Lilith's medicine is righteous indignation - the cleansing anger that rises up from the gut and screams, "No more! I won't play by your stupid rules any longer. I won't be your narcissistic supply. I won't crush myself to placate you and I won't become angry and abusive and greedy like you so I can succeed at your no-win game."
We all know that our society has degraded to the brink of terminal unsustainability. We all know that raping the Earth, poisoning the Third World, and sacrificing our children to the gods of greed and the whims of old white men is wrong. Deep down, we know life is supposed to be joyful and creative. We know that everyone deserves a fair chance and that no one should have to go hungry. We know that scarcity is an artificial construct designed to keep us in a continual state of fear and enable the one percent to control us and harvest our life energy.
Maybe - whatever the intent behind its global unleashing - the coronavirus is part of the Cosmic Fire prophesied by Peter Duenov and by so many indigenous prophets of the last century.
Maybe this is what it takes to awaken us and to remind us that we are powerful beyond measure. And that it is our manifest destiny to heal our trauma, to allow ourselves to make art and beauty, and to build loving, sustainable community together.
*Note for students of astrology: I circled Jupiter and Venus in the USA's birth chart to emphasize that the T-square involving the Nodes, Chiron and Lilith is also activating the USA's 1st House (national identity) and 6th House (sickness and work) by the system of rulerships. We could also include the USA's 5th House and 10th House, both ruled by Venus, but we've got to end this piece somewhere!
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