2020-09-17 New Moon in Virgo, 7am eastern

 

(p.s., If the concept of "God" is not your thing, please forgive me and take the next few paragraphs as allegory and a brief survey of how other people celebrate this most auspicious occasion of a new moon in Virgo at the end of summer. It's just such an exciting moment in the history of the world, and all the Virgo in me is bubbling through the top of my skull and it's hard to contain myself :-)

And p.p.s., "God" is the word I use to name The Source, The Universe, whatever That is that is eternal, that has always, will always exist, and that piece of That which I know we feel is inside us, that resonates inside us, that reverberates inside us with the That's "Cosmic Hum". Right now, it's humming to create in us not only clean hearts, but a Brand New Me.

And lastly, when I say that "God is closer to us right now than at other times during the year," I mean the veil is thin between us and Eternity. You know the orbits of the planets are elliptical which is how we're sometimes closer to the Sun for summer and farther away for winter? this month, right now and here in time, the veil is thinner between us and Eternity, and all the planets are aligned to offer us the most aid and the most energy to Get 'Er Done ... The Cosmic Visitation. xoxo Sew ... without further AhDew ... )

It may be a new moon, but we're also at a time of last things, the last month of summer, the last month of the Hebrew calendar, but the tips of our toes are also standing on the starting line of a whole new personal rebirth. The entire universe is poised, right at this second, to manifest a whole new beginning for us personally, a whole new world for us personally, a pat on the back, a hand up, and a "here's the key to the executive wash room" sort of affair.

Guess what else. This month? In the Hindu calendar this year? This is an EXTRA month we're given, an extra chance, a month in our lives for free! because it's a lunar calendar and every few years it needs it to align with the solar one. And it just so happens its happening now at a new moon in Virgo.

What are we going to do with a FREE month, extra time which so many, at the end of their lives, have yearned for. This month is so special, so holy, that no specific festivals are held ... we are to embrace this month for deep meditation, quiet spiritual exercises like various methods of fasting (from fruit or dairy or meat or anything for a minute, an day, the month), performing extra prayers and rituals, what ever can help us make the best use of this extra time to catch up on our relationship with the Divine.

Interestingly, Adhik Maas 2020, this extra month, is occurring in the Hebrew month of Elul which is always treated as special time set aside to deepen our relationship with the Divine.

The Hebrew month of Elul marks the beginning of the end of the Jewish Year and it has a festal atmosphere with shofars blowing every day to announce to all within hearing distance that Rosh Hashanah is only a month away.

Elul is associated with the constellation of Virgo, and with the Tribe of Gad. Virgo is the Mutable Earth, Transformative Manifestation, sign, whose function is that of sifting, analyzing and choosing that which is useful, while discarding that which, while perhaps pretty or pleasant, does not serve the highest purpose.

Virgo is often relentless, and you may feel yourself experiencing high tides of feeling a need to clean everything, get rid of junk, needing to get on your Honey-Do lists, needing to revive your exercise schedule. Her best attributes are being analytical, health-conscious, literary, logical, loyal, meticulous, tidy, and her shadow side, on her worst days, she is picky, prudish, relentless, accusatory, and very very critical.

The Hebrew word "gad" could be translated as “a troop,” which is fitting for this Mercury-ruled month during which we strengthen ourselves spiritually, like soldiers preparing for battle, to prepare for the upcoming Days of Awe, the ten days starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur (Yamim Noraim).

Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, is the Jewish New Year, the day of raising a noise, shouting and blasting and singing and dancing. Yom Kippur, ten days later, is the holiest day of the year in Judaism, is also known as the Day of Atonement with its central themes of atonement and repentance.

That sounds heavy, baby, but it's not. By the time we get around to those days of repentance, we should be pretty well cleansed. We're given the entire month of Elul to meet God, the KING of the UNIVERSE, in the middle of a field where God stands, waiting to cover us in hugs and kisses. The Cosmic Visitation.

The presence of God is very near to us during this month, on the same plane that we exist upon, as opposed to high and lifted upon a throne as during the High Holidays which come at the end of this month. That closeness is meant to inspire a cleansing ritual, not out of shame, being that close to something so pure, but out of refreshment, knowing that we are completely enveloped in love and acceptance and that the entire universe is solidly behind us in any endeavor we take on.

God standing in the middle of a field, seeing us come from far off, jumping up and down, waiting for us to fall in to an embrace. After we've spent this month with God, cleansing ourselves in this spiritual shower, and knowing how silly all of the guilt we're carrying is, no matter how well deserved, in the big scheme of things, and in light of the fact that the past is past and time is short, can't we just regroup, grow, promise not to be such a complete butt-head, and try to move on more graciously?

This is a time for serious introspection and thanks heaven, Virgo is there with a clipboard and a checklist waiting to take inventory and tidy everything up.

The alignment of the planets in the configurations they will manifest throughout next January have never really been recorded and won't occur again for thousands of years.

Seriously.

The two biggie planets which have an enormous influence over everything in the cosmos, Saturn and Pluto, are having a gay 'ole time this year, and they are coming back together in a configuration they were in at the BEGINNING of the year, so everything old is gonna be new again, we're going to revisiting The Way We Were, so you know better now, go out and get some toilet paper.

Remember how tense and oppressive and overbearing and controlling all that energy was? You went through it before, what did you learn. How will you deal, what were your the strategies that worked best.

Now that Virgo's around, eating your feelings isn't going to bring the same satisfaction. She's gonna make you work out, she's gonna make you weigh your food and take your vitamins, she's gonna wanna take step class ... just let go and let her rule because you'll always come out better and healthier on the other side of a run around with Virgo.

Good news is, with all that Saturn and Pluto revival, combined with everything else that's transpiring in the heavens, there WILL be a finalizing, a release, the beginning of the end, the breaking down of "old structures, old paradigms," old oppressive energies that no longer serve us, energies that feel too strict, too burdensome, too tight ... it's like we've been kind of caged up in a lot of ways.

So Here We Are:

we HAVE been doing our homework,

we HAVE been making our lists,

we HAVE taken the first steps in to our new life,

but all of a sudden there was a pause in the universe, remember Mars?

We were on a good trot but now we're sort of suspended.

Well guess what, We're Off ! Here we go !

We need to refreshen our focus on what we truly and deeply need, versus what we truly and deeply want and desire, in very specific areas of our lives, and deconstruct what no longer is serving us, or even take what we've learned during this pause and rearrange what works better, that is more in service of what we desire, what is our soul's Truth deep down in our heart of hearts. Maybe not the dream we started out dreaming, but perhaps that whisper of The Dream We Never Dared Dream, The Impossible Dream, the That'll Never Happen Dream.

We've talked about Lunar Nodes before

http://bit.ly/AuntieDaschNodes.

There's also a fabulous fable about them as part of the Hindu pantheon as Rahu and Keto which we talked about before

http://bit.ly/AuntieDaschRahuKetu.

In astrology, the North Node represents the qualities we need to develop in order to grow, while the South Node represents the qualities that come naturally to us ... and that we might rely on too much ... and that we might need to clean up if they're not working for us. Encoded in these nodes is our life's purpose.

These "Nodes Of Fate" usher us directly toward our most fulfilling spiritual life path. They also tell us what skins we must shed in order to get there. Our South Node represents where we're coming from and what we're bringing into this life and all the gifts and qualities that we've already mastered. Oh yeah, and all the crap we're dragging along with us that's no longer serving us, only weighing us down.

The North Node, on the other hand, represents the path that we are growing into through this life, our karmic paths and the lessons we came here to learn, or the language we are learning to speak. It's our destiny. And it's not always going to be easy to embrace, but it will most certainly be spiritually fulfilling when we do.

Every one and a half years, they change signs which already happened in May when we were making our lists that we're using now. The Nodes of Destiny left where they'd been since 2018, and entered Gemini and Sagittarius where they’ll stay until January 18, 2022.

The North Node represents what we need to add to our lives, and it's now in Gemini, which means a focus of energies on intellectual growth, continued work on improving our communication styles, and letting go of anxieties.

Letting go of anxieties.

The South Node, entering Sagittarius, indicates that we’ll have to let go of the urge to be “right” all the time and concentrate on OUR OWN PERSONAL details, rather than forgetting the details when we're looking at the big pretty picture of the future.

The Nodes are opposite one another on The Wheel and they work in harmony to keep us balanced, which is why it’s important to consider them both. Don’t give too much to the future or the past ... instead, we need to work to balance out their energy now as we stand on this moment in eternity trying to bring peace while making sense of the madness.

The coming four weeks indicate the line of greatest development is through pruning and shaping our words and deeds. WORDS HAVE POWER ! Words created the entire Universe ! "LIGHT !" And there was light ... We need to carefully explain to the Universe, in thought, word, and deed, what we are trying to externalize. This is the time to show active care in exercising control over our OWN environment, not to get in to anyone else's crapola, and manage our OWN impulses (especially those which would want us to get in to anyone else's crapola ...). we need to MIND our OWN BUSINESS !

We need to be gorgeous and rise above it all (and step out of the way of the splashes of people stomping about and throwing up wakes of slime and yuck).

We're in a time of unprecedented flux. We're in a season of crosscurrents and conflicts, also an era of inexhaustible inspiration, creativity, with some hard adjustments to make things simpler and easier.

Remember, the more difficult, complex, strenuous we make the tasks we put on ourselves ... the more work WE do ... the less work is required of us ... does that make sense? REALLY buckle down. We need to REALLY re-up our attention to homework, because we finally must realize that irritations don't just go away ... don't just ... disappear ... if we don't make peace with them they come back until we do, so we may just as well roll up our sleeves and get those dishes washed. But also and again, never before has the Universe been poised to offer us so much energy, so much encouragement, so much support.

Let's DO it !

Nodes. Rahu. Ketu.

 

A “node” is "the point at which lines or pathways intersect or branch; a central or connecting point." The moon has two nodes on a theoretical line in the sky called the ecliptic. There is a north node and a south node. Part 2 of our Node discussion offers an origin story of these nodes and you are not going to want to miss it because it’s told from the Hindu pantheon of Vedic astrology (Jyotish) and it explains this all BRILLIANTLY and delightfully.

So in the science of Astronomy, there is an imaginary line on the sky that marks the annual path of the sun. It is the projection of Earth’s orbit onto the celestial sphere. If you picture a beam shining from earth straight through the sun, and then everyone takes a trip for an earth year, it would be the circle drawn by that line on the other side of the sun. It is an essential part of any stargazer’s vocabulary because without its essential theory we wouldn’t be able to easily explain celestial events.

In studies of Astrology, the lunar nodes are the crossing points at which the orbit of the Moon around the earth crosses the ecliptic. Remember, the path of the moon is on a bit of a tilt, so as it’s moving on the path of its orbit, on the FAR side of the earth it’s said to be in it’s ascent, the ascending node, the "north" node, and coming back 'round it's coming to it's "south" node or the descending node.

The general Astrological theory behind the significance of the Nodes of the Moon suggests that we all have some underdeveloped and overdeveloped aspects in our character. The Nodes of the Moon point us to these specific qualities: the South Node, when the moon is lazily on it's descent, suggests our overdeveloped character traits, our lazy, fall-back positions, the knee-jerk reactions we have, our often mostly unattractive go-to postures, those personality mannerisms which very may well undermine our lives, they certainly do our development, if we hold on to these traits just because we're lazy, just because we need to feel security, and, in often in reality, just because we can't let go or won't get off our ass to better ourselves. The North Node suggests the qualities that we need to develop in order to find inner balance, to reach our potential, to better ourselves and thus, the world. The Nodes of the Moon can also suggest personal karmic imbalance. If we over-emphasize and fall back on the qualities of our South Node, for instance, at the expense of developing our North Node, we may have a difficult time feeling personally successful to say nothing of having any feelings of general accomplishment. Whether or not we consciously work on these lessons, events in our lives are likely to force us to confront them at one time or another, so why don’t we take scheduled inventories to clean ourselves up throughout the year, hmm?

In Hinduism we believe in One God, that's all. That one God, however, has lots of attributes and so each one is given its own representative personage for illustrative purposes. The mythology is terrific and there are tons of different stories about single incidents which occur, like this one. So ...

There are different levels of deities, some seeking goodness and blessings, some seeking power and domination, some good, some bad, they get jealous, the have battles, they have supernatural powers and weapons, they cheat, they play tricks on one another, they're sneaky, and wonderful and horrible. Sometimes the evil ones will trick the good ones and gain boons and special blessings that can't be taken back because they were won fair and square. 

So, right off the bat in the pantheon we've got the TRIMURTI, or the TRIUMVIRATE, the three attributes of God which are responsible for the Creation of the Universe (Brahma), the upkeep of the Universe (Vishnu), and the natural endings of cycles, like autumn (Shiva) ... 

Once upon a time, Vishnu decided to have a party ! And he invited each of the Deities who represented the Seven (shuddup) planets to come to the party so that they could church up the Ocean of Milk to make it release Amrita, the nectar of immortality. (again, shuddup.) It took a millennium. Lots of stuff was released during the churning, there were battles and wars, but those are stories for some snowy night by the fire. Most of the tales say that Dhanvantari, the god of medicine, decided that The Churning Was Done and had produced the Amrita, but the demons snatched it ! and refused to give it back.

So Vishnu appeared in his only feminine incarnation, as the enchantress Mohini, the most beautiful female form in the universe then or ever, and tricked everyone in the heavens, the deities seeking power and the dieities seeking goodness and blessings, to sit down in rows and Mohini would distribute the Elixir of Immortality to each and every person individually. Rahuketu, a Rakshasha (a man-eating demon), who is in appearance a great and mighty dragon or snake, disguised himself as a deity in order that HE might become immortal, and he snuck in and sat down and received some of the Nectar of Eternal Life.

The Sun ! and the Moon ! saw this ! and they screamed at Mohini ! to stop ! but by that time Rahuketu was already immortal. Vishnu was LIVID ! and pulled out his sword and chopped the demon in half ! Wuhl, the demon is immortal ! so his head became known as Rahu and his tail became known as Ketu. When they saw how angry they had made Vishnu (again and still, shuddup), they did penance for many years and were eventually given status as "planets". They are the powerful force that operates in our lives to control the karmic influences and situations as they sit on the intersection of the moon's transit across the ecliptic.