Recall
March 2nd, 2022
Today the Sun and the Moon meet in Pisces in close conjunction with Jupiter (planet of expansion) and with Neptune (planet of ideals) nearby, forming a stellium in the 11th house of friends, collectives and the social at large. This concentration of planets highlights where the seed of renewal that each new moon brings lies and how it operates. In this configuration, the seed appears as a crisis: it figures a certain idea of the collective facing dissolution, the idea (Sun) and ideal of the basis of collective existence (Neptune), its ethical reach (Jupiter) and how it orients our sense of interconnection (Moon).
The ideal and form of the collective confronting the demand for dissolution is the sovereign nation-state and the self-determined (free) individual/citizen that inhabits it. The Pluto/Mars/Venus conjunction right on top of the sky (midheaven) accurately describes the way aggression (Mars), death (Pluto) and attachment (Venus) combine to maintain the institutional structures in which power is concentrated and held, i.e. the State (Capricorn). This appears in the Russian state’s military invasion, which is obliterating the conditions for daily existence in the country. Just as most didn’t believe that Vladimir Putin was going to invade, no one I believe expected that this war theatre would feature the hailing of the Ukrainian nation, as the President Zelensky calls the people of Ukraine to embody the (self-preserving) state in proper cisheteropatriarchal garb.
Figuring this crisis is the new moon’s challenging aspect (semi-square) to the Pluto/Mars/Venus conjunction in the 9th house, at once reacting to and reckoning with the core beliefs, ethical principles, and philosophical understandings (9th house) that underlie the institution organising our daily collective lives (Capricorn): the nation-state. This reckoning comes perhaps as an intuition or a felt sense that will unfold over the coming lunar cycles, while Pisces - as the last sign of the zodiac - does its work of dissolution.
Because it is happening in Pisces, which is also the last of the water signs, this announcement of the dissolution of the nation-state does not open a window to oblivion. Instead, as it recalls the many refugees from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, who have knocked the doors of Europe over the years, it is a reminder of the many more and deeper interconnections between humans and nonhumans alike.
This announcement does not tell us what lies beyond the dissolution but invites questions that may guide us there, such as: What would become of the collective if it was no longer imaged as a grouping of individual dots? Would a nation-state still be thinkable when the multiple material belongings and entanglements we are composed of would be acknowledged?
In this moment when so many watch the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, which is presented in a way that heightens a sense of connection, I read this new moon as a fleeting chance to get a sense of what the ongoing Uranus-Saturn square may be possibly activating. Indeed, since the beginning of 2021 Uranus has challenged the fixity of Taurus (the body, the planet and the resources we enjoy) with its disruptive energy, while Saturn has provided rules, boundaries and forms to the unconventionality of Aquarius (the abstract and ethical principles that organise our existence). As the tension of this ongoing square comes towards an end we may begin to glimpse how fundamental ideas of “freedom” and “humanity” are re/de/composing, especially in this lunation when Saturn is joined by Mercury, making explicit what the existing composition is, and thus what else it may possibly be.
Moving with, and moved by this new moon, and the context on which its sheds its dark light, I read this picture of the sky as an invitation to dissolve those idea(l)s of the collective that guarantee (demands and justifies) the endless deployments of violence and to consider that dissolution a practice and an embodiment of a deeper interconnection that is our task to manifest (new moon trine ascendant and north node in Taurus).