Solstice Greetings - Grounding a Vision of Reality
At the Solstice on December 22nd we enter the Earth energy of Capricorn – a great time to practice grounding energy, including bare feet on the ground, if you can actually bring yourself to do that in the winter cold and damp. At the Solstice we experience the shortest day and, therefore, the longest night. The Sun Festival of the Solstice may well have been celebrated in the past as Yule or even Christmas Day. Falling within the seven-day Roman festival of Saturnalia, December 25th was decreed as both the birthday of Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun) and the Winter Solstice. The days from the solstice would now be lengthening in preparation for Spring and Summer.
Our minds and our senses have been assaulted over the last few years, so it becomes doubly important that we take the opportunity to ground and calm ourselves in order that we have the strength and focus to deal with the challenges that are to come. With the Moon in the earth sign of Taurus at this Solstice time, a sign where she is exalted, grounding becomes much easier. Auspiciously also at the Solstice, the Moon sits with Jupiter, suggesting optimism, hope and positivity up until the Spring Equinox. Saturn, the Sun’s ruler, sits with the Fixed Star Fomalhaut, one of the Royal Persian stars, bringing the idea of the need for a spiritual teacher into the mix.
Pluto sits at the final degree of Capricorn, where he has the potential to focus upon the more shadowy, nastier side of Capricornian traits before he re-enters Aquarius in January. In the meantime we must prepare for humanity’s entry into a world where we will be pulled into a much more artificially ‘intelligent’ way of life. We could argue that our natural intelligence came to an end just before the start of the current millennium when Google was invented in 1998. Before this point we would have used ‘effort’ (Saturn) to discover information. Now we merely press a button. Pluto will re-enter Capricorn briefly in September 2024Sols before he finally leaves in November 2024 for the full 20-year experience of Pluto in Aquarius.
Astrology allows us to be aware of the more artificial/scientific side that Aquarius holds, in terms of technological progress that is now reaching astonishing levels, including synthetic health, synthetic food and even potentially synthetic DNA. But, in counterbalance, this period of the Solstice through to the Full Moon carries a very loud message of spiritual regeneration and spiritual grounding.
At the Full Moon on December 27th we have a really strong Moon – she is in her own sign of Cancer. Both Sun and Moon are involved in lovely harmonious aspects with Saturn and Fomalhaut as well as Jupiter (who sits at the degree of October’s lunar eclipse). We are receiving a strong message calling us towards spiritual strengthening, echoed by Mars and Mercury (still retrograde) on the galactic centre, the whirling centre of consciousness, square to Neptune. This very strong Moon brings both hope and optimism as well as the ability to face reality. Mercury has the capacity to get right into the heart of human consciousness with a sense of pointedness and sharpness. So, as we prepare to enter some kind of new age and the stormy waters of 2024, the Moon reminds us that we are as strong as she is in her own sign. This is saying we must be prepared to work hard within the spiritual realms to understand the deep needs of a conscious humanity that believes in a true spiritual reality, rather than one that is artificial and synthetic.
Saturn, our reality, is in Pisces, the chaotic realms of our non-reality, where we can envision and travel into the beyond to see how we can co-create our future reality. Pluto’s entry into Aquarius is where we will go alongside the collective to envision and put into practice the imaginative senses of the new ideas that Saturn will put form and structure into. The Aquarian realm of matter in the form of plasma energy surrounds and cloaks us in its invisible and intangible field containing all of consciousness that has ever been and all that will be in the future. However, we can only open ourselves to learning if our entry point is the spiritual realm. Time (Saturn) becomes non-linear in the sign of Pisces, so we can bring everything contained within plasma consciousness into our own consciousness. In Pisces we are asked for compassion and service for all, as opposed to only those who wish to impose the ideologies that serve them rather than humanity as a whole. Through Fomalhaut at this time we can envision a future spiritual humanity so long as care is taken to avoid excessive pride in one’s beliefs.
Chiron sits with the North Node in Aries; we are being encouraged to ‘see’ our wounds and our hurts and face them head on so that we are able to heal. The whole notion of astrology is that it is a roadmap to show us the way to developing our souls by working towards achieving our full potential. AI is the genie that has been released from the bottle and presents as humanity’s next challenge. At the moment it is in the control of the few, but it may not remain that way as it learns and grows and then makes its own rules. So there has to be a counter challenge if humanity is to remain relevant. Humanity has that extra instinctive side that AI has no chance of reaching just yet. AI is excellent at generating and analysing data, but humans are instinctive, intuitive beings, able to reason and problem solve; they need meaning within their lives. So many instincts have already been dampened down, but our best chance of survival is to concentrate on the skills that make us human. If we only ever see ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ we will for sure be the turkeys who voted for Christmas. The message of this Full Moon is to strengthen our spiritual practices and ground ourselves within Mother Nature in order that we can truly envision for the future. Breathwork and meditation will calm both body and mind, and this will enable decision making in a calming efficient way.
I want to thank you all for reading my lunar offerings through the year. I wish you a very happy Christmas break. Enjoy, rest, recover and repair – be kind to yourselves and see you in 2024.