New Moon in Pisces; connect to the numinous
The Pisces New Moon each year is the Moon that carries our intentions forward into the Vernal Equinox. The last sign on the zodiacal wheel, Pisces, prepares us for Aries, the sign of individuality and new beginnings. This year, the New Moon in Pisces leads a large process of planetary archetypes; Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, and the North Node all align in this sign of invisible connections to something larger. Pisces yearns, always searching for the numinous. It carries the dual qualities of both enchantment and disillusionment. And this year, it is a New Moon where we are especially poised on the brink of change.
March’s sky is full of movement, of transition. The old saying March comes in like a lamb and goes old like a lion comes to mind. Venus moves into retrograde motion on March 1, the next two lunations are eclipses, with the Vernal equinox taking place in between and on March 29, the day of the next New Moon/Solar eclipse, Mercury retrogrades, and the following day, Neptune moves into Aries.
That’s a lot of movement, portending many shifts in both the months and the year ahead.
In astrology, the word transit is how we describe planetary movement. Just like mass transit systems in cities, astrological transits move us both internally and externally. They take us on a journey, both collectively and individually. During this passage, we begin in one place and arrive at another destination, sometimes imagined, sometimes one that surprises us.
In the months ahead, this is what to remember: collectively, we are about to embark on a sojourn of sorts. Some of our charts will be more personally activated than others, but we are all moving through a period of change together.
This New Moon activates the area in our charts Pisces lies. Here, we long to be connected to something larger than ourselves. Here, we experience a sense of yearning for something more. Though we often view this through the lens of the outer world, at its core, this sense of belonging, which is at the core of connection, is an inside job. When we consciously hold and fan the flame of inner kinship to ourselves and our destiny, it is far easier to trust the path that we are on and the power it has to magnetically draw us forward along the greater pathway of our life. Yes, we will always have to manage the inner critic that says we are somehow both not enough and too much simultaneously, yet when we listen to the inner siren song that calls us forward beyond any so-called logical plan that we have laid out for ourselves previously unimagined doors mysteriously open.
This New Moon asks us will you let yourself dream?
First, we dream and then we practice believing. These two faces of Pisces work hand in hand. They collaborate. We have to let go and trust, which sounds easy but for most of us taking that leap of faith, whether metaphorical or literal takes faith. Which is a muscle we develop via practice.
Neptune, the modern ruler of the sign Pisces, was the God of the Ocean. Neptune is connected to the unconscious, from which dreams, both those we have at night as well as our soul yearnings, arise. He is the principle of higher love, unconditional love, and grace; to dance with Neptune is to know that everything is connected and that anything else is mere illusion.
Most importantly everything includes us, we are connected. To each other, to our dreams, and how we move through the world, both implicitly and explicitly is felt by everyone. In physics, this is the core of Chaos Theory…the infamous Butterly effect which states that when a butterfly moves it wings over Japan it is felt in the air currents in the United States. To paraphrase Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love, our playing small doesn’t serve the world.
When I was little, I remember watching on television Broadway icon Mary Martin playing Peter Pan. In the middle of the show, Tinkerbell drinks a vial of poison so that Peter won’t and begins to die. Peter breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the audience, in particular to the children in the audience, and tells us that in order to live Tinkerbell needs us to believe and urges us to clap our hands so she will know. Of course, even in our living rooms we all wildly clapped and she was revived.
For me belief was far easier as a child, as an adult I have had to work, to practice. My family was not comfortable with what I was drawn to as a career path: theatre and astrology. And like most, I was an expert at internalizing everyone else’s skepticism. Again and again, I have had to move past my self-doubt and take a leap of faith. For me, it helps to see it as a practice.
If we have Neptune heavily emphasized in our chart, as I do, as we evolve we learn through our experiences that we must move beyond our desires and connect with whatever path our soul has chosen. We sacrifice (aka make sacred) the lesser for the greater knowing that we will be rewarded with a level of understanding that our personality-driven selves could not have known about. We begin to understand that all of our previous deprivations had to do with getting these lesser desires out of the way, so that we could be initiated into the deeper and higher levels of love and connection. And at that level, we begin to realize something very important. That love isn’t an emotion, or an experience, or a state of being. Love is a power. A connecting power. It’s the ultimate creative force. When I began to assimilate this, really viscerally take it in, and then worked at embodying it through practice my world vastly changed and opened. As I attuned to it my perception of everything altered.
That’s the power of love; it causes us to open to something larger, something ecstatic, and from there, a new awareness emerges.
Think about it. Whatever we pay attention to in our lives, whatever we care about, grows in our consciousness. What our consciousness registers gets fed back to us in our lives. That is the power of this New Moon.
Nothing would be accomplished, nothing created, if it weren’t for love. To create something, we must first envision it, and the visionary principle belongs to Neptune and its connecting power. We must love and nurture our dreams, our inner vision, into being.
We are on the brink of change. As we embark on the journey of both 2025 and 2026, it is important to hold our imagined destination in both our minds and hearts and remember we are all on this journey together.
New Moon in Pisces
February 27, 2024
7:44 PM EST/4:44 PM PST
9°40 Pisces
