Henry Seltzer – Tuesday’s Last Quarter Moon comes along at an extremely interesting time, as we get ready for a new and really quite intense cycle that will take us into the end of the month period and beyond. This lunar phase also signals a shift in point of view when we realize that we are just a little more aware than we were before the cycle started. In this case, we began with the recent Gemini New Moon from mid-June, and we were just at that time coming out of the extended Mercury Retrograde period.
We thus were in the process of mulling over what we had learned during the previous month of that concentrated retrograde period. This July month, toward its ending, we also encounter the timing of a Venus retrograde, beginning on the 25th of July, making us stop and think about key relationships in our lives, and also of a potent stationing Uranus the very next day; as well as Saturn‘s station to direct motion coming up on August 1st. The times are quite intense, and the patterns invoked by this Last Quarter Moon itself are also revolutionary.
The Sun and Moon make a T-square to Pluto, within about two degrees, while Mars is closely trine to Neptune. The Moon is getting ready to connect with Uranus, about four degrees away from the quarter moon, later in this same evening, so that all three outer planets are involved in this configuration.
The transformational effects of Pluto are well known, and need not be dire, especially if you have been working your changes; if you have been lagging, there could be something of a shock associated with a powerful Pluto transit. We all of us have some part of ourselves that we need to let go of, and some part that we need to embrace more fully, as we move ahead with the spiritual evolution that we came here for, and that is our birthright.
We remain in the aftermath of the seven exact hits of Uranus and Pluto in their square alignment, a defining feature of the astrology of this decade. We have been stretched, perhaps beyond the point of comfort, and we will go on stretching for the next few years as we watch the evolutionary currents settle. This is a wake-up call from the universe for your life, which has only these few and such informative months to go before everything is over. Rather than a reason for despair, the apparent shortness of this earthly life is cause for celebration of each and every moment of its ephemeral beauty. We need to be up and doing, because we have come here for some ultimate purpose, and our mission is to figure out what that purpose actually consists of, while there is still time.
The Sabian Symbols for this Last Quarter Moon are, as usual, enlightening. They are, for the Sun, in the 17th degree of Cancer, “The germ grows into knowledge and life,” referring in one specific example to the human embryo, or fetus, and we can therefore take this as a quite literal symbol of human evolution. We find this expressed in particularized terms in the commentary by Marc Edmund Jones: “the irresistible determination of living substance to press forward … uncompromisingly in the expansion and refinement of its own special genius and identity.”
He also has “a completeness in personal realization and self-consummation.” For the Moon we find, somewhat mysteriously: “Two prim spinsters.” Jones likens this symbol to “an entirely private sustainment of reality” dependent on “the eternal pro and con” of daily living, and we are reminded as well of the recorded wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, that a sound individual “has his yes and he has his no.” Jones goes on to state that this degree symbolizes “an utter fidelity to self and all its special idealizations and … capacities.” In these two symbols you can therefore find the subtext of becoming yourself at all costs. It may be that you win by discovering within you that special something that makes you unique amongst all humans, and by sticking to that inner core of personal belief as your undeviating road to your own unfoldment.
Henry Seltzer is a Guest Writer for Shift Frequency
SF Source Astrograph July 2015