Lunar Eclipse in Taurus: The Immovable Object Meets An Irresistable Force
Lunar Eclipse/Full Moon in Taurus
Saturday, October 28, 2023, 1:46 pm PDT/4:46 pm EDT
5:09 Taurus
Life and death, beginnings and endings are two sides of the same coin. Tomorrow’s eclipse, Saturday, October 28, 2023, at 1:24 p.m. PDT/4:24 p.m. EDT, is the last eclipse in a cycle that began in late 2021, in other words, we are ending a two-year cycle which means we are also beginning a new one. With this eclipse, we fully move from eclipses in fixed signs to those in cardinal signs. It’s a lunar eclipse, the Moon (in this case in Taurus) is partially shadowed by the Sun ( currently in Scorpio), putting the Sun in a position of authority and pointing the way forward.
Eclipses can bring dramatic change, particularly if they are directly impacting a planetary archetype within your chart.
While solar eclipses open portals to new beginnings, lunar eclipses embody the completion of some part of our journey. They urge us to shift our course. From an astrological perspective, the Moon, both natally and by transit is not just an intellectual concept, it is an experience. It is our felt experience of life itself.
In many ways this eclipse is the ultimate expression of the unmovable object, Taurus, meeting the irresistible force, Scorpio. On a personal level, the Taurus-Scorpio polarity challenges our conflict between staying with the known or relinquishing it for unfamiliar territory, to face the deepest darkness, the untested unknown path in front of us.
If you think about it the gift of most successful long-term relationships( whether with another or with ourselves, a career, a dream, or life itself) is that they have the ability to continually renew themselves. Taurus loves stability. Scorpio on the other hand continuously seeks renewal, its greatest fear is stagnation.
Symbolically, this eclipse asks us to take stock by inventorying what we are holding onto physically, emotionally, and mentally and determining what we must let go of. Scorpio is a sign of purging. What is worth holding onto? What do you need to release?
We need to create space for forward movement within our lives. From this moment onward until 2025 the eclipses are primarily in the cardinal signs of Aries and Libra. The cardinal mode is about movement. It’s about initiation, about implementation. It’s about making something real out of a new creative impulse. Aries initiates, and Libra refines and balances.
It is rather ironic that in language we refer to ourselves and others as a noun. Nouns do not change. They are stable. Yes, there is something eternal within each of us, yet we are here incarnate in life. And life itself, though it is also defined as a noun in language, is really experienced as a verb. It is constant movement and change. A verb is an action word. It describes the movement of the moment, verbs describe how we migrate from one place to another.
Eclipses, yet another noun, herald change. This eclipse is a nudge from the cosmos urging you out of stagnant energies and old patterns. It is inviting you to release the sludge and make room for new life.
The truth about nouns and verbs is they need each other. Language too at its best authentically tells the story of our experience. It describes our movement, our transformation from one place to another within ourselves or simply driving across town, though that is a bit hyperbolic. We are constantly in a state of change even though we often feel the urge to stay within known territory as it wraps us in the comfort of the familiar.
Much of the work of Scorpio is alchemical; nothing short of the metamorphosis of ourselves and our lives. To do this we must face the shadow within that contains all sorts of buried treasure, the very key to our transformation.
Yet, here it is paired with Taurus reminding us that stillness too has value, prodding us to take the time to digest both the awareness and events that our set in motion at this time. Remember: To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself. It literally becomes soup. But certain groups of cells survive, turning the soup into eyes, wings, antennae and other adult structures. It contains the cells of its original iteration but they have become transformed.
This describes the process Carl Jung called individuation. He believed that this process of self-realization, of self-discovery and meaning, essentially how we become a person in our own right, was the meaning of life. As he famously said “Your vision will only become clear when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks insides, awakes.”
Eclipses are an invitation to awaken. To move onward toward our own metamorphosis.
