October is a tough month in a tough year. Today’s New Moon in Libra reflects that. In an ordinary year, we’d look to a Libra New Moon as a time of harmony, peace, and beauty. This year calls for a strength and focus we don’t usually associate with Libra.
In the last weeks, we’ve been bearing up under onslaughts of Mars and Eris squaring Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn. This retrograde Mars ignites emotions and actions in response to the long term pressure of Saturn and Pluto together in Capricorn, accompanied over the last years by Mars, the South Node, and currently, Jupiter.
In another two months and a bit, Saturn and Jupiter together will leave Capricorn as they meet in Aquarius to decisively usher in the Age of Air.
We’ll be concluding an Age of Earth which saw the industrial revolution in all its iterations around the globe, and the rise of modern infrastructure in forms that have taken over natural habitats in incredibly invasive and damaging ways.
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I cannot unpack these astrological ages in any comprehensive way. My work focuses on individuals, not world events. Other astrologers offer deep, valuable analyses of this.
The shift, though, is an important frame for today’s New Moon. It points to why we and the world feel so unsettled. Why it seems so difficult to sort out effective responses to the challenges before us. Why we feel at sea, unable to get a handle on what’s really going on.
This shift is affecting the Mars and Eris squares to the Capricorn group. Mars in Aries wants a clear goal, a target, a focus. Eris, also retrograde with Mars in Aries, has myriad goals but cannot now the access to power she needs.
In this kind of situation, our shock, anger, distress, and grief can become weaponized and then aimed at the wrong targets. Wrong because they are deliberate shams, or because we’re mistaken or limited in our understanding, or because we’re not skilled enough or don’t care enough to sort it all out.
The result is free floating anger and, in some cases, violence that adds fuel to the cycle.
Saturn and Pluto copresent in Capricorn these last three years have inexorably exposed what is not working in our current structures. This is true of physical infrastructure, banking and market systems, and governments.
The tension between Mars and Eris in Aries and Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn is unstable, unsettling, and on fire.
The New Moon in Libra opposes Mars and Eris and squares Pluto and Saturn, which turns the Aries–Capricorn squares into a T-square. This shifts the energy.
Sun and Moon meet at 23 Libra, the end of Venus’ daytime home. In this third decan of Libra, we focus in on how to balance many things at once. We realize how much is out of balance. We know one area of life cannot be stable when many others are not.
Larger solutions are needed.
In popular astrology, Libra is often downplayed as a sign of “making nice,” “going along to get along,” and “people pleasing.” This is a narrow, superficial view of Libra, one that will not serve us well now.
Libra is the sign of the advocate, one who stands up for the rights of others, who makes sure every voice is heard. Libra has the capacity to be fierce in defending of others, understanding that justice must be pervasive and comprehensive to be authentic.
Sometimes advocacy takes the form of resistance.
In electricity, resistance describes how the flow of a current is controlled, slowed down. In some cases, this creates dangerous situations in which insulation burns and bare wires spark fires. I think we can all see the analogy to some current events (pun noted).
But resistance is also one way we put electrical current to work. It’s how we make toast, for example, by slowing down the flow of electrons through wires that glow with heat. We like toast, and other things resistance can create.
This New Moon in Libra is not about specific solutions but instead about process. In the current chaos, we may be sure some things are very wrong without being clear on what the best answers look like. We need process.
Libra knows if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
This New Moon can resist the explosive anger of Mars and Eris, and the entrenched power of Saturn and Pluto, by continuing to demand that all voices be heard. Only when we can hold space to hear, and be willing to listen to those very different from ourselves, can we find the best way forward.
In weight training, resistance builds muscle and bone, as well as our emotional strength as we realize we can do more than we thought. World events are offering personalized resistance training as we confront opinions, emotions, actions, and systems that are toxic.
At this New Moon, where might you find a way to shift perspective and view a challenge you’re facing as strength training?
This is not at all about simply redefining a horrible situation into an opportunity by calling it one. There’s no room for easy positivity here.
Instead, it’s about inviting in new perspectives and voices, looking for alternatives. Within our own psyches, we have multitudes. Are there voices within you serving to tear you down? Urging you to give up? Which alternative voices can help build strength?
This Libra New Moon is ruled by Venus, currently @ 16 Virgo. This is a place of careful, detailed planning. A place where the world is reshaped by what Austin Coppock calls “a seed, a suit of armor, or a cocoon.”
Remember that every authoritarian regime, every use of power to coerce and control, has faced resistance movements. Such movements involve networks of ordinary people who work together to take extraordinary action. The labor movement, the underground railroad, resistance movements against occupying armies––there are as many examples as there are coercive powers.
At this New Moon, consider your public resistance. Are you working alone? Can you join with others, supporting shared efforts toward justice? We have more impact when we work together.
The Libra New Moon also invokes the connections with Ma’at, the Egyptian goddess who weighs the heart at the time of death. She, and this process of weighing, represents the strength of Libra: the creation of harmony and balance through the exercise of justice.
The Sun and Moon linked to Mars and Eris, and Saturn and Pluto, call out for the deepest kind of justice, a reordering of how we see ourselves as human beings on this planet.
At this New Moon, we examine our own principles and values. Who do we include at our table? All people? Only some people? What about other beings? Only some beings? The Earth as a being?
Mercury has just begun their retrograde in Scorpio. At every level, we’re invited to review how we position ourselves relative to power. We’re called into deep examinations of not only what we believe but how we enact that belief.
The New Moon and Mars and Eris also aspect the Nodes of the Moon. Mars and Eris trine the South Node of the past and sextile the North Node of the future. The New Moon trines the future and sextiles the past.
Our principles and our actions together create the future emerging from the past. This New Moon invites us into conscious partnership with this process.
The astrological charts are my own. The images in this post include the title,
adapted from the raised fist by visuals,
and the following images:
the protest sign by Micheile Henderson,
the little fish/bog fish “organize’ classic (for which I couldn’t find a definitive source, and
the feather by Javardh.