Sabian Symbol:
SCORPIO 18°: A PATH.. BRILLIANT WITH MULTICOLORED SPLENDOR.
KEYNOTE: The exalted feeling of a work well done and a truly consummated life.
Full Moons are always time of culmination, representing the fullness of the previous New Moon’s energetic seed planting. Our Sun and Moon as our luminaries are in opposition. Every year we have a Scorpio Full Moon, full of the darkness of regenerative and magnetic forces, the seed of autumns inward turning present in the fullness and light of mid Spring.
The Taurus/ Scorpio axis in Astrology is about love and passion, personal and shared resources, life and death.
Our Scorpio archetype asks us to express our intensity, our driving need to investigate what is hidden in life and to experience the cyclical nature of it. From birth, life, death, rebirth- we continue on. This knowledge must be experienced from deep within our own wild and instinctual natures. Scorpio is receptive and intuitive, she feels and perceives information rather than intellectualizing it, To live according to our own soul we accept and integrate the darkness in the light. We can all use this energy to connect to soulfulness in our lives now.
Our Full Moon brings things to a head. She is trine Neptune and our Sun in Taurus is conjunct Mercury. This calls for us to divine our progress, to cast oracles for the future and to receive messages from our own sub conscious selves for guidance and protection.
Mars and Pluto co- disposit or rule the lunation.
Mars is in late degree Aquarius and Pluto RX Capricorn. Both are social signs, originally sharing Saturn as their ruler and concerned with the structures that make communities, governments and their like possible.
Pluto is retrograde- in it’s “review and revise” phase- and Mars will join the retrograde party this year in September. Another key to what we are learning this year about the truth of our world’s restructure-- may become revealed near this full moon.
Our collective need now is for a deep dive for new ideas, research and investigative thinking that has the potential to move ourselves out of a tough spot. Keep your inner fires burning as we shed the skins of the old to make room for the new.
photo by Lawrence Drayton @nevarmur
Here is a a little ritual adapted from: www.elephantjournal.com
Shedding Skins Ritual
1. Prepare your altar in its usual place or on the coffee table.
Here are some ideas, but feel free to use what you have or make substitutions: change your cloth to black or deep red. Arrange black and white candles. Add runes, or tarot cards, a mortar and pestle, a rattle to awaken the ancestors, crystals, a statue of the goddess, a pomegranate, pictures of your ancestors.
2. Find music that will draw you in, something ethereal, enchanting.
3. Pour yourself a libation: lusciously red wine, or some dark juice such as cherry or grape. Surely you have some dark chocolate around? You will be sharing with the Goddess and the Fey
4. Take a sensual bath, indulge in every whim. You are working Scorpio energy, so every bit of sexual energy you wish to evoke is completely called for.
5. Dress in something you feel good in; perhaps a costume you associate with roaming the Underworld, and your most magical self. If you happen to have one of those masks worn at masquerade balls, put that on.
6. On a piece of white paper, write some layers you wish to shed. It can be the way you process things, the way you love, old habits that no longer serve, words you say to yourself. You know what those things are.
7. Call in your allies. Spirit guides, animal familiars, angels, the four directions, goddesses or gods you are inclined toward—the Crone, the Dark Goddess, The Dark Moon, the four elements.
8. Fold your list into four, bless with an incantation for safe journey. You work is energetic, but will be felt in the physical world. You may burn the paper as with love and gratitude you release the masks and skins which have so faithfully been trying to protect you for so long. You no longer need them.
9. If you’d like to go a step further, delayer your garments until you are standing naked before your altar. Be willing to see yourself free of those old patterns, to see them for what they were. Anoint yourself with your favorite essential oils. Feel the skin of your new becoming. Admire the beauty of you. Create new worlds with your intentions. If doing with others, pass a kiss and a blessing to the left until it reaches you again.
10. Congratulate yourself on the journey you are beginning, and since it is still new moon energy, cast new dream seeds to the wind! Seal all with chocolate, wine, and a meditation or simply moments of silence.