We enter this Full Moon with the Sun and Jupiter conjunct in Leo. This is a warm, wonderful combination. The Sun is at home in their golden palace, the place they’re most powerful. Jupiter is warmed here, welcomed, invited to bring his most expansive, beneficent self.
At the beginning of Leo, though, we’re still at the edge, still deciding what our role will be. Will we step into the spotlight and take the mic? Or slip away and find a seat in quiet corner?
This first decan of Leo is ruled by Saturn, the careful one, the planful one. He’s in Aries, another Fire sign, but has just stationed retrograde. This Saturn stands still, weighing his options carefully.
While the Sun sits proudly in their castle with a great buddy, the Moon at the beginning of Aquarius is far from home. She stands with Pluto, lord of all the underworlds. Together at the opening of Aquarius, these two are travelers in strange lands.
“To be a rebel is to court extinction.”
― Louise Brooks
This Aquarian Moon makes well-structured plans based on her strongest principles, a pattern that can lead us to deny our emotions and our bodies. It’s not a comfortable place for the Moon to be. It can be a lonely place. Even as we choose to leave a familiar setting that no longer works for us, we still feel the loss of family, community, and everything familiar.
The Moon conjuncts Pluto, who is especially austere in Aquarius. We talk about Aquarius as an innovative, creative, clear-thinking sign that ignores boundaries and breaks taboos. This is true. Yet at this Full Moon, we may feel, emotionally, the losses that go with that. When we go forward into the new and strange, we leave behind the old and comfortably familiar.
Pluto also represents the dark, what is hidden but also what hides. Pluto can signal the kinds of exile that are forced, not chosen. Separations what can never be mended. This Moon, with this Pluto, feels that, too.
“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”
–– opening line of Warsan Shire’s poem, Home
Pluto conjunct the Moon is a difficult aspect. Built into the birth chart, it can lead to feeling we don’t have a home, or don’t fit in anywhere. In this Full Moon chart, we can see Pluto as the immensity and power of what challenges us, individually and collectively.
Pluto can feel overwhelming. This Aquarian Moon will not be easily cowed. This is an enduring Moon with a strong focus of her own. What will this Moon choose? That question can be answered many ways, depending on our perspective and experience, and also how this Moon–Pluto conjunction and the Full Moon chart overall interact with our birth charts.
“I leave with tears blurring all that I see.”
––Euripedes’ Electra
Pluto also serves to connect this Full Moon with outer planet aspect patterns.
Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune have been traveling together in a triangle pattern for months now. Sometimes looser, sometimes tighter, this shallow triangle is exact right now. Pluto trines Uranus as both sextile Neptune, all at 04º of their signs.
In recent weeks, this triangle became a trapezoid. This pattern was described by astrologer André Barbault, who named it a sign of great change.
Barbault was a mundane astrologer, someone who focused on world events. He is perhaps best known for his prediction of a worldwide pandemic, which, shortly after his death, showed up as COVID.
His writing about this current pattern was framed very positively. While it would be lovely if that were true, the events we see swirling around us now do not support that. What we can be sure of is that when outer planets link up, and then close-in bodies like Jupiter and the Sun and Moon connect as well, we will see consequential change.
So, at this Full Moon, the Moon becomes part of the outer planet triangle as she is conjunct Pluto. The Sun–Jupiter conjunction shifts the triangle into a trapezoid by opposing Moon–Pluto, sextiling Uranus, and trining Neptune.
This pattern creates a chaotic, generative dreamscape in which change can be sudden and irrevocable before we are able to tell whether the change is good or ill. So much is happening at once, globally. We can’t be sure the information we do have is accurate or complete.
This Aquarius Moon does her best to be clear, well informed, and careful in her thinking. Still, we just can’t know for sure.
What country, friends, is this?
–– Viola, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
If we stay with this “world change” framework, we can see the Mars–Venus square, also part of the Full Moon chart, as reacting to change in complex ways.
Venus in the third decan of Virgo has plenty of data: The world we knew is changing, or maybe already gone. The life we have left will not unfold the way we hoped. Mars in the third decan of Gemini sees this too and he’s pissed.
So if you find yourself going beyond anxiety and irritation to feel straight up anger, it could be the Mars–Venus square. Or, you know, the world.
Mars–Venus can also show up as determination to get a thing done. Venus in Virgo sees a need. Mars in Gemini will not let go until it’s met. This isn’t the unwavering focus of the fixed signs of the Full Moon itself. Instead, it’s the drive to find a way through. The determination to reach a goal no matter how many twists and turns the path may take.
I’m thinking, as an extreme example, of reels I’ve seen in the last days of farmers in France and in Ireland who showed up with tractors and attachments to do whatever they could to fight the massive fires surrounding them.
Farmers, you say, wouldn’t they be Taurus? Maybe, but these young men rode their machines right along the edge of the flames, knocking down the harvest to create a firebreak, knowing at any moment a spark could ignite their engine and that could be that. When the interviewer asked, weren’t you afraid? they shrugged and said, we wanted to help.
The Mars–Venus square could look like rage, or like focused determination.
Mercury in Cancer rules both sides of this square. Virgo and Gemini. Newly direct, Mercury is transiting, for the third time, the degrees of the retrograde. They’re in the final pass, when we review whatever the retrograde tossed up, to see how we can integrate what we’ve learned. It’s been a lot.
Mercury is helpful in this role. Neither Mars nor Venus are well placed where they are in the zodiac, but Mercury rules the second decan of Cancer. Austin Coppock, in 36 Faces, says those born with Mercury here “can speak to the tangle of needs and wants which reside within people.”
The Mars–Venus square can create just such tangles. We can turn to Mercury to help sort them out, to find the right paths to navigate our current mess.
This Full Moon is complex and challenging on its own. It’s also a gateway.
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Our next two lunations are eclipses. The New Moon on August 12 is a total solar eclipse at 20º Leo. The Full Moon on August 28 is a partial lunar eclipse at 4º Pisces.
This Aquarian Full Moon wants us to attend to the big picture, the long term. Not just what’s in front of us right now, even though that alone is challenging enough.
By the New Moon eclipse, Mercury will have moved into early Leo to be the new anchor of Barbault’s Basket, as the overall pattern softens a bit. Venus will still be squaring Mars, but from Libra to Cancer, in a wider square. By the Full Moon Eclipse, these patterns will be gone and new patterns will be emerging.
Whatever the eclipse patterns are, though, we know August will be a time of change. That’s what eclipses bring. We could throw up our hands and say, oh, this is all too much. I’m staying on the sidelines.
Or, we can engage with this Full Moon to see and feel how the big changes in our world affect us. Where is our focus? Which communities do we claim as ours? Which communities are we leaving behind? Where do we feel at home? And what does home mean in a world in the grip of so much change?
Title photo from a photo by the US Library of Congress on Unsplash
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