Another Earth

Body Made of Stars for the Full Moon, Mercury Rx, Jupiter in Leo, and a Hot Summer of the Mars Uranus conjunction in Gemini

Last week, the Sun reached its zenith. And tonight, the moon reaches hers. We are in the full brightness of the year, and this clarity of illumination is present all over the star chart as it is in the quality of consciousness here on Earth.

In the mesoamerican cosmovision, it is not the solstice day that marks the brightest point of the year, but rather the full moon nearest the solstice — a long day, and a bright night.

And what a strange thing it is, when you really let yourself see it, to look up from this turning rock and find another world hanging there in the dark, a second sphere lit silver against the black, reflecting back at us a light we cannot otherwise look at directly. The full moon is the only time we get to see the sunlight whole, softened, made bearable, poured onto a mirror and handed back to us as something we can actually behold. Tonight she rises round and full at 8 degrees and 14 minutes of Capricorn, exactly opposite the Cancer Sun at the very same degree, the two great lights facing each other across the whole width of the sky, and for a few hours the heavens hold up a mirror and ask us to look.

I have long thought of the full moon as the albedo, the whitening, the silver stage of the alchemical work, when whatever we have been cooking down in the dark of the new moon gets washed and brightened and shown to us in the clear. The lunar bath. The soul rinsed and held to the light. This particular moon is a small and far one, the second and final micromoon of the year, riding her lowest and longest arc across the short summer night, which means she is not the brightest full moon of the year at all but one of the most distant. There is a teaching in that too. The light we are being shown is faint and far and honest. It does not flatter. It is the cool silver of Capricorn, the sign of the mountain and the bone and the long climb. The Moon is uneasy here, in her detriment, in the house of the father and the structure and the law rather than the house of the mother and the home and the tide that she rules and loves, and will return to next month when she wanes new in Cancer.

So this is a full moon that asks the feeling body to grow up a little, to take shape, to accept form. She does not get to do it gently, because she and the Sun are both squared hard by cruel, bone-grinding Saturn and by oceanic Neptune, the two of them sitting together at the first degree of Aries. A square is friction, and friction either tempers a thing or snaps it. Saturn says build it real or do not build it; Neptune says build it beautiful or do not bother; and the Moon, caught between the great timelord and the great dissolver, has to find a way to give her tenderness a backbone without letting the dream leak out of it entirely. This is the work of reparenting, of becoming the mother and the father to ourselves that the dying world could never be.

In the old Tarot, Capricorn is the card of the Devil, the figure of bondage and appetite and the chains around the necks of the two figures at his feet, and the whole secret of that card, the thing the Devil does not want you to notice, is that the chains are loose. They were always loose. You can lift them off over your head whenever you finally decide that you would rather be free than comfortable. The Psychopatharchy runs on the wager that you never will.

Just as the Moon comes full, the morning star turns and begins to walk backward. Mercury stations retrograde on this very same day, the 29th, at 26 degrees of Cancer, and he travels back through those tender waters until the 23rd of July, when he turns again at 16 degrees and begins to retrace his fleet-footed falls. This starryteller relishes a Mercury retrograde, and relishes this one especially, because Cancer is the sign of memory and lineage and the home we came from, of the inner child and the divine mother and the long inheritance carried in the body before the mind ever finds the words for it. To walk Mercury backward through Cancer is to be given a slow and holy permission to return, to sit with the ancestors, to reopen the conversations we left unfinished, to ask the body what it knew long before we taught ourselves to override it. Mercury is the solvent in the alchemist’s flask, the quicksilver that dissolves the old fixed forms so something truer can precipitate out, and for three and a half weeks he is dissolving us gently in the waters of where we come from. And he does it while standing almost on the very last degree of Cancer, the anaretic 29th, shoulder to shoulder with great Jupiter, the two of them at the threshold of the sign, gathering up the last of the lesson before they cross over. The card here is the Moon herself, the path that runs down into the dark water where the lobster crawls up out of the deep, the road of the unconscious that you cannot think your way along but only feel.

And then tomorrow, on the 30th, Jupiter crosses. The great benefic, the planet of faith and abundance and the widening of the world, leaves the waters of Cancer where he has spent a year teaching us to rebuild our felt sense of safety from the inside, and he strides into Leo, into the sign of the Sun, the heart, the lion, the sovereign, the creative fire that does not ask permission to burn. For the next thirteen months Jupiter blesses the open heart. He asks us to be seen, to make the thing, to sing the song, to stop apologizing for taking up the spotlight. In the Tree of Life this is a move from Yesod to Tiferet - from the silver foundation of the moon to the golden center of the sun, the sphere of beauty and of the radiant heart that holds the whole tree together. In the Tarot Leo is Strength, the maiden with her hands on the lion’s jaws, not prying them open and not forcing them shut but resting there in the perfect confidence of love, mastering the beast by refusing to fear it. That is the high road of Jupiter in Leo, the sovereign self that has nothing to prove, and we should be honest that there is a low road running right beside it. The South Node comes into Leo in late July and Jupiter will eventually meet it, and the low road of Leo is the inflated ego, the performance for applause, the false king, the leader who confuses being adored with being good. The first test arrives rather sharply around the 20th of the month, when Jupiter swings into opposition with Pluto down in Aquarius, the radiant individual heart squared off against the vast impersonal power of the collective and the machine. The whole question of this Jupiter year is folded into that opposition: Will we use the courage of the open heart for ourselves alone, or will we turn it, the way the nodal axis is turning us, from Leo toward Aquarius, from the one toward the many, the sovereign self placed in service of the whole?

But the chord that everything in this week is leaning toward, the note the whole summer is tuned to, sounds on the 4th of July. Mars, the red planet, the warrior, the will, the match, meets Uranus, the awakener, the lightning, the great disruptor and liberator, at 3 degrees and 52 minutes of Gemini. The two of them will meet at an exact square to the nodes of the Moon, so the meeting carries the particular flavor of fate of something that has been coming for a long time and will not be talked out of arriving. Mars conjunct Uranus is the Tower card, plain and simple: the bolt of lightning that strikes the false tower, throws the crown off its top, and sends the figures tumbling. It is never comfortable and it is very often necessary, the sudden honest stroke that brings down what was only ever held up by pretending. In Gemini it strikes through the realm of words and wires and news and mind, through the very fiber-optic tendrils that the narrative control matrix has threaded into all of our nervous systems. Uranus has only just entered Gemini this spring for the first time in his eighty-four year orbit, beginning the long liberation of the mind, the cracking open of how we think and speak and connect that will run for the next seven years.

That it lands on the 4th of July, the exact quarter-millenial birthday of the reign of terror and transformation that is the USA, is the kind of thing that makes all timekeepers put down their coffee. This is the United States meeting its own Mars and its own Uranus at once, both planets coming home to the exact degrees they have held since 1776, in the house the old astrologers called the place of open enemies, with stern Saturn standing across the sky in opposition to the country’s own Saturn, all of it ringing out while Pluto finishes the slow return that has been dismantling the empire from the inside for years now — the same return that came around for Rome before its fall. The pattern is ancient and well-documented; the last times Mars and Uranus met here in Gemini, the cannon spoke at the founding, and again at Fort Sumter, and again in the years the atom was split and the world remade. I will not stand here and proclaim catastrophe, because most of the time these lightnings strike at a human scale, in the sudden quarrel and the sudden freedom and the plan that changes overnight. Revolutionary optimism is not the same thing as doom. But I will say that this is a hot summer in every sense the word can hold, the literal heat of an Earth we have cooked past her old thresholds, and the political heat of a long hot summer of the kind this country has known before. A season when the loose chains start to feel loose to everyone at once. Mars is fire and Uranus is the spark. And the tinder is dry, personally and communally and collectively. What catches will depend on what we have each been quietly building in the dark.

Here is the thing the whole sky is trying to tell us this week, reading it all at once, the silver moon and the backward messenger and the lion-hearted benefic and the lightning over the empire.

Two Earths are hanging in the sky right now. There is the Earth that is ending, the one run on extraction and fear and the cannibal logic called Wetiko, the one whose towers are being struck because they were only ever pretending to stand, and there is another Earth, faint and far and silver as tonight’s moon: the regenerated world, the holoarchic symbiocene that is priming itself to take the wheel, the one we glimpse in the mirror the full moon holds up and recognize as ourselves. The only road from the one to the other runs straight through the core of the human heart.

We go down into our own Cancerian waters with retrograde Mercury and we gather the ancestral medicine. We let the Capricorn moon and her Saturnine squares temper our tenderness into something load bearing. We let Jupiter in Leo give us the nerve to be seen building it. And when the Tower falls, as towers struck by lightning tend to do, we do not despair. The card that always rises after the Tower in the deck is the Star, the woman kneeling at the water pouring the heavens back onto the Earth: hope after the collapse; the body made of stars recollecting itself. We take the lead of our own conditioning and our own grief and our own inherited fear and we decoct it, patiently, over the heat of this long summer, until it runs gold, and then we do the only thing worth doing with gold, which is to give it away, to pour it into the loops and the commons and the new Earth that is being woven right now by everyone who refuses to believe the chains were real.

Look up tonight. Let the far silver light fall on your face, and do not look away from what it shows you. The other Earth is not somewhere else and it is not some other time.

It is the one that grows in the compost of this one. It is being chosen, or refused, in ten thousand million quiet human hearts tonight. Yours included.

We have everything we need. The chains were always loose.

In revolutionary optimism,

Samu

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Body Made of Stars offers natal, synastry, electional, and astrocartography readings on a sliding scale. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Reach out to book at starrybodies@gmail.com.