Like all Virgo Full Moons, the one on the 3rd, at 3:37 AM PST at 12 Virgo 53, asks us to come to critical conclusions, to analyze who is responsible, who deserves what, and to share our ‘harvest’ appropriately; this one includes the drastic measures of an eclipse and so demands a final accounting with the result likely being that the boards will be swept clean and a completely fresh weighing, judging, estimating, and accounting will occur. All the calculations we’ve made, the ideas we have of who owes what to whom, may go down the drain, replaced by a demand for a ground-up assessment that may or may not resemble what came before. This can be disorienting, as we struggle to keep track of what counts, what suddenly doesn’t, and the kaleidoscopic shifts of responsibility and obligation that will definitely go through some modification under this full Lunar light.

Add to this that despite the immediacy of what occurs and the direct demands it makes on us, we’ll suffer a sense of our ability to affect things, to make choices, as once-removed, with much of the Lunar energy flow seemingly beyond our reach. We see this in several areas of the eclipse picture, including the way the Nodal axis (always close to the Sun/ Moon axis at eclipse times) forms a tidy T-square with the Black Moon Lilith point=dynamism, emotional conflict, the flow of things/ time, pushed below the surface, exiled to the unconscious, ignored in favor of–what? What the Sun touches tells us where our attention goes at any one time: here Sol widely squares BML (and so dares us to be conscious of all we’d like to bury) and trines Jupiter in Cancer. That suggests we’ll be trying fiercely to discern what matters, what we care about, and that deciding these things will loom large–in fact, exaggeratedly large–in our consciousness. We’ll feel we must figure out what matters to us, must be aware so that we can choose and move successfully–but creating a mental list will be a futile exercise, a distraction, from what really matters: knowing which ocean we’re swimming in (the Pisces Sun).

I know it might sound counter-logical under a Full Virgo Moon, but consider that, during a Merc retrograde in Pisces, mental gymnastics, lists and criteria and details and specificity are exactly the wrong place to put our energy; we’re guaranteed to misperceive, to count incorrectly, to miss a trick, to miss something–so that an eclipse that appears to require this function of us is almost certainly nature’s way of misdirecting our attention so that we can be led to the correct environment by circumstance, coincidence, restrictions imposed, or the intervention of others. If we chose that environment/ ocean consciously, we’d choose the ‘wrong’ one, that is, one that doesn’t serve the needs that, for all our trying, we’re currently unaware of. So, it’s a Piscean ocean we’re to enter–one of creativity, imagination, ideals, the fantastical, made up perhaps of what we’ve only up to now dreamed of, fantasized, or believed unattainable–and we need to be ready to surrender ourselves and our conscious minds to the Neptunian influences, without struggling to define exactly where we are or what’s happening to us–and that may be hard.

At the time of the eclipse we’ll have four bodies arrayed across Pisces from 00 to 26 degrees, with the Sun at the midpoint. Mars will be of earliest degree, urging us (almost certainly prematurely) to act, with Merc retro headed toward Inferior Conjunction in less than a week and Venus sextile Uranus in Taurus. This scenario suggests we need, more than anything, patience: to allow the vision to unfold, to see what new and surprising things we might love, to discover the message behind the images and ideas, to imagine our ideal choices and course of action–rather than rushing forward just to feel things move.

The Sabian for the Moon is, ‘A Powerful Statesman Overcomes A State Of Political Hysteria’; the Sun’s Sabian is, ‘An Ancient Sword, Used In Many Battles, Is Displayed In A Museum’. I would say at the personal level this is a two-fold admonition: that a calm internal core strong in values can keep us from needlessly and fruitlessly succumbing to panic of one kind or another (that is, may keep us from acting precipitously or from trying to create the detailed accounting rather than indulging in the intuitive swim), and that we are adequately ‘armed’; we are already in possession of what’s needed, we just have to activate it. Our ability to assert and defend ourselves has been more passive than active of late, on display rather than ready for its intended purpose. We’ll need to remedy that.

Also at a personal level, any contacts being received by our natal Neptune at this time, as well as matters of the House transiting Neptune is moving through in the natal chart, should offer clues as to what may loom large, important, and full of information and creative energy for each of us at this time. Have a wonderful eclipse!