This week’s powerful lunar eclipse (Friday 19 Nov @ 7:57pm AEDT) is characterised by potent signatures for change. Lunar Eclipses, like Full Moons, signify culminations and endings and can bring revelations and the kinds of events, internal or external, that shift the course of lives over a period of around six months. Today’s lunar eclipse is exalted in Taurus and also foreshadows the themes we’ll be working with for the next 18 months when the Nodes of Fate shift from Gemini-Sagittarius into Taurus and Scorpio on January 19. The Nodes, which dictate the signs of eclipses, return to the same signs in 18 year cycles and their reverse positions every 9 years. Looking back to 2003-04 when the North Node was last in Taurus and the South Node in Scorpio, and to 2013-14 and 1994-95 when they were in their reverse positions, will offer a glimpse of the storylines being reinvigorated now relative to the position of the nodes in our chart.
Today’s eclipse is layered with complexity. The lunar cycle began with the New Moon opposing Uranus, planet of unpredictable change and rebellion, and culminates with the god of war and passion, Mars, opposing the planet of revolution in the sign where the Moon is being eclipsed. It suggests the possibility of volatility, violence, polarisation, protests, intensity and extremes but also for powerful shifts that liberate us from old patterns if we think outside the box. We may experience a passionate release of energy in the breaking of routines and courageous and electrical insights about things that need to change. Creative, financial, health and environmental breakthroughs that emerge from the cutting away of old attachments and reliances on the things that not longer serve us and our desired transformations. Venus, goddess of love, relationships and resources rules this eclipse from sober Capricorn and makes an exact trine to Uranus today, enhancing the Great Awakener’s capacity for wise maturity. She also highlights an eccentric sophistication in beauty, creativity, pleasure and relating.
Mars too makes a positive sextile to Venus from its rulership in Scorpio, helping us identify strategies for action that align with our longterm goals. The planet of action and desire will move into its exaltation in Capricorn in late January, which suggests that we’ll find the momentum and follow-through needed to realise desired outcomes then. Venus remains in Capricorn until March 2022 as she completes a journey of transformation through the mythic underworld, which begins when she stations retrograde on December 11. We get more serious about the longterm value and commitment of our energetic, relational, creative and material investments and feel the weight of decisions that we hope will stand the test of time. When Venus finally emerges from this journey of death and rebirth she rises as a morning star. It’s the preferred guise of Venus as ruler of Taurus, which augurs well for a flourishing fruitfulness in Venusian areas we may find ourselves temporarily challenged by in December and January.
Finally, today’s lunar eclipse at 27 degrees of Taurus is conjunct the fixed star Algol. A blinking, binary star which eclipses every three days, the ancients considered it the most malevolent of the fixed omens because it was continually dying and being reborn and foretold the death of a leader when conjunct a lunar eclipse. Biden’s natal Sun opposes today’s eclipse at exactly 27 degrees, which is not quite the same thing, but does suggest life-changing challenges over coming months. The ancients also associated Algol with the severed head of Medusa, located in the constellation Perseus. Although famous as the monstrous snake-haired gorgon, the poet Ovid described Medusa as the most beautiful, and the only mortal, of three gorgon sisters.
Raped and impregnated by Poseidon in the temple of Athena, Medusa was cruelly punished by the goddess for desecrating the site, transforming her into the most grotesque and horrifying of creatures with a visage so hideously terrifying that one glance turned men to stone. The hero Perseus was ordered to bring the head of Medusa to the dubious King Polydectes who wanted the hero dead so that he could have his way with his mother. Perseus was given magical tools of protection by the gods to achieve this feat with his own purpose in mind: Hades’ helmet of invisibility, a sword of diamond adamantine, the winged sandals of Hermes’ and a mirrored shield of brass that would protect him from Medusa’s gaze. Shielded by these instruments, Perseus severed Medusa’s head and her children, conceived by Poseidon, one of which was the winged horse, Pegasus, burst from her neck. Eventually Perseus would use the head of Medusa to protect his mother by turning Polydectes to stone.
But Medusa is extraordinary in Greek mythology because her most legendary feats and powers actually increase after death. Her gaze creates landforms, her blood fills the sea with coral and her hair populates North Africa with snakes. Affixed to the shield of Athena her gaze repels armies, making her the most powerful protective force in the mythic world. Throughout the ancient world too, Medusa’s head was used extensively as a symbolic device to protect and ward off evil. But her mythic powers were also life-giving. The healer Asclepius used blood from a vein on the left of Medusa’s head as a fatal poison and blood from a right to resurrect the dead, a service which angered Zeus and Hades but eventually led to his own transformation as a god revered in temples throughout Greece. As such Algol brings a layer of fierce mystery to this eclipse. The extraordinary powers of Medusa contain a profound duality, both fearful and fearsome, injurious and life-giving, protective and destructive, just and unjust, which suggests that in the eclipse cycle ahead we too may grapple with similar dualities as we learn to harness our powers and protect those less powerful than ourselves, to transform the karma of our own inheritances and to nourish prosperity, healing and renewal with the possibility of divine miracles when we least expect them…
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