A Slow, Difficult and Surprising First Quarter Moon

Monday's First Quarter Moon provides startling revelations and inconsistencies, and surprising enlightenment, in the context of a sowing down of all forward-moving activity that will last at least through the final week of the month. This is a powerful lunation that also comes along in the middle of a rather intense retrograde of Mercury that was very nearly coincident with the recent late Taurus New Moon from eight days ago. This lunar phase signals a time when plans that seemed conceptually easy must come to terms with real-world limitations in their working out, a factor that is augmented by The Sun and Moon in opposition and square with Saturn in the early degrees of Sagittarius, making a T-square. This signifies an intense slowing down of forward momentum that is yet productive of lasting lessons, based on the natural accompaniment to the Mercury Retrograde period: introspective self-reflection.

As astrologer Caroline Casey is fond of pointing out, water passing through an irrigation ditch sinks into the ground more effectively the more it slows down; a fact of nature truly worth meditating upon. The effect of Saturn, and also Mercury Retrograde, is to force a pause, whereby we can have the chance to take a closer look at what it is that we are really up to.

Along with Saturn, Uranus and Pluto are also separately triggered in the timing of this quarter Moon, because Jupiter closely aspects transformative Pluto while close aspects are being made to Uranus from Mercury, Venus and the Moon, implying that while dwelling almost too completely in the here-and-now symbolized by Saturn we are also experimenting, socially and mentally, with an unlimited sense of possibility — or as Jeffery Wolf Green referred to Uranus, "freedom from the known."

We are being enjoined at this time to make a stab at a practical life that is nevertheless lived with full-on connection to the Mystery of existence, of which the evidence is all around us. Uranus tunes us in to the architecture of the universe, as available in an immediate way once we open the internal intuitive gates of perception in order to receive it.

The Sabian Symbols for this First Quarter Moon have, as usual, something to contribute. They are, for the Sun, in the 5th degree of Gemini, "A radical magazine," bringing in the feeling tone of a rebellious urge to transcend the current strictures of society. Marc Edmund Jones relates this symbol to "a necessary element of change in human affairs, and the extent to which ... the entirely potential will have its full and functioning part in any immediate reality with which an individual may be seeking to come to terms." For the Moon we find "A man dreaming of fairies,"" which is fairly self-explanatory once we recognize that dreams carry important and very real information. Jones has: "the ability to use the coin of [one's] inner and eternal experience with a practical wisdom and insight." Indeed, while we must dwell in these three dimensions and work within our natural senses and the requirements of our physical bodies, it is only by breaking out of the narrow limitations of outmoded thought forms and allowing our minds to roam wild that we will truly be able to advance the state of our consciousness and that of the world around us.