The New Moon perfects at 2:59 PM PST on the 9th at 20 Aquarius 40. This also marks the start of the Lunar New Year as celebrated in a number of cultures (it’s the year of the Dragon in China, for those keeping score). A New Moon in Aquarius promises new beginnings, offering a blueprint to integrate feelings with understanding of the things that trigger those feelings. It’s a dawning within the human psyche, a point when Higher Mind can process reality in ways that will benefit us, if we can let go of preconceived notions and level up.
Three aspects stand out immediately: a square to Uranus, a trine to Vesta, and a quincunx to Juno. This is a tough picture, implying unexpected, spontaneous, and difficult, disorienting events. Chaos, revelation, or revolution may result, or we could find it’s the individual versus the group. What happens is measured against what we honor and find sacred–that will determine our reaction to what occurs, with adjustments needed on our part to gain or maintain empowerment. It could be a Uranian event that challenges us to respond, or it could be that the Uranian action is ours (and if so, we may not know it’s coming until it arrives), based on protecting what we honor, particularly in the way of partnership, but in any case our ability to answer from a position of personal strength will require modifications to our approach and/ or our behavior. The contact between the New Moon and its ruler suggests a tight relationship between Lunar events and the nature of the Moon in this sign–it all may seem random, haphazard, unpredictable, but it’s almost certain that we’ll look back on this as something we could’ve anticipated–we may even convince ourselves we did.
We’re offered a measure of grace, though, via a septile between the New Moon and Ceres, the latter newly arrived in Capricorn and still at the 00 degree. This suggests there’s a spiritual way to synthesize reality, what’s ‘natural’, our emotions, and our personal power and authority picture; we’ll see where and what we’re actually responsible for, and be given a grace period during which we can vet the situation and choose a way to meet it. This will be new to us and likely brings forward ‘fresh’ feelings; it almost certainly involves any position of responsibility we hold or may involve Nature in the form of natural disasters or events, our health, or inevitable changes such as aging. How we meet these will be paramount; it’s only in accessing our spiritual core that we’ll do our best when confronted.
The New Moon makes a semi-sextile to Venus, and I’m not comfortable claiming a sextile between the New Moon and either the North Node or Eris, both in Aries, but I am ready to say there’s a sextile to their midpoint, with a corresponding situation involving a trine to the midpoint of the South Node and Zeus in Libra. This is a mirror situation with a stand-off between energies of letting no stone go unturned (and so no issue not dredged up and flayed), and the elements of desire (lust, even!) and ambition, with these latter asking us to focus up on long-term goals and let go of distractions. We’re likely to be keenly aware of discord as distraction, even as we believe we must handle it in order to maintain control of our life direction, and there’s a corresponding sense that what we’ve done to fulfill ambitions and goals in the past should have pointed us to the right aesthetic choices and the right partners for our endeavors. Both sets of these perceptions are misleading: the very worth of working this out is highly questionable, with the apparent conundrum essentially one huge distraction. Our energy best goes toward in-the-moment responses to new developments (Uranus square), with our responses both keeping what we find important in mind (Vesta trine), and orienting any reaction toward amplifying our own empowerment within the situation (Juno quincunx).
The Sabian for this New Moon is, ‘A Disappointed And Disillusioned Woman Courageously Faces A Seemingly Empty Life’. This may speak of the anima, the receptive, ‘being’ energies in each of us, stirred by the cool Aquarian Moon to awareness of the clinical side of things, our losses and failures, the ways in which we have let ourselves down, and the reality of being existentially alone. Depressing, right? But the nature of an Aquarian New Moon is such that it offers fresh insight, even as it mercilessly reminds us in detail of the state of things. Notice use of the word ‘seemingly’. That implies the situation only appears to be without anything worthwhile, with the words ‘disappointed’ and ‘disillusioned’ suggesting that ideals have been pummeled, hopes dashed, but that courage is the secret ingredient for re-framing, and so taking both a more optimistic (that is, less negative) inventory, and a more accurate one.