Astrological Highlights: September 16 - 22, 2024
The Soulfulness of the Pisces Lunar Eclipse
Here are some insights about the opportunities and challenges that this week’s astrology may offer us collectively. If you’re looking to access personalized astrological and self-care insights to help you navigate the now, I’d love to do a Stellar Guidance Session or a Stellar Constellations Session with you.
This week we greet the Pisces Lunar Eclipse, a lunation that can provide us with more proximity to soulfulness, connecting us to a deeper sense of the numinous, to an aliveness centered in a vast spectrum of awareness, and to the experience of feeling an integration between facets of ourselves—including mind and body—that on the surface often seem distant and disparate.
While we experience a Pisces Lunar Eclipse about every eight years (the last one was in September 2016), this year’s seems exceptionally Piscean. That’s because this sign’s two planetary rulers—Neptune and Jupiter—are intricately *tied into this lunation.
As fate would have it, I just began reading a book—The Planets Within—that feels exceptionally aligned with this moment. Written by Thomas Moore, it’s an exploration of the astrological psychology of Marcilio Ficino, the 15th century Italian scholar, humanist philosopher, and astrologer.
And while I’m only about 50 pages in, and can only speak to the very preliminaries of the book and Ficino’s work, I did want to share a few of the (many) things that stood out for me so far as I feel that they are so resonant with the inspirations of the moment.
To Ficino, everything exists with soul, which serves as a mediator between mind and body, grounding ideas into the mundane world and infusing the natural world with a depth of awareness. Soul is that which expresses itself in images, dreams, and stories. Imagination is its lens and portal. Emotions are core to soul and provide it with motion, with movement. In addition, Ficino posed that one of the essential vehicles for nourishing the soul was art, which he placed at the center of life, rather than as a peripheral subject of entertainment or amusement.
All of this feels so resonant with the here/now, with this Pisces Lunar Eclipse, which offers us an invitation to orient with more soulfulness. I see its invocation not only as an approach to enrich the essential nature of our lives but also as a way to further understand what we may be currently moving through.
I say this because during this week we may find ourselves crossing thresholds, navigating the liminal, and experiencing the dissolve of barriers that may have us make contact with an expanse of visions and feelings that we oftentimes don’t. Our dreams may be especially vibrant, our perceptions more sensitive, our moods quite activated. We may find ourselves more apt to swim in oceans of emotions. As awareness comes to light regarding how we have lived through the lens of our ideals, our desire to commune with love, and our longing to feel that we are connected to something greater than just ourselves, we may find ourselves surfing the waves of feelings, through the peaks of joy and gratitude to the valleys of sorrow and disillusionment.
This may leave us inspired and yet there may be times when it has us absorbed in confusion, which is sometimes the wont during exceptionally Piscean times.
To discern what is emerging, we can turn to the inspirations of Virgo, where the Sun is located, categorizing and analyzing the impressions to which we are connecting. Yet, we shouldn’t necessarily just stay there, as we can also integrate Ficino’s wisdom and suffuse ourselves with a soulful orientation.
We can attune to our dreams. We can nourish ourselves with art. We can quiet our rational mind and see what knowledge is percolating below. We can open the vault to our imagination and see what streams forth. We can meander through poetic verses. We can lose ourselves in the fantasy of a movie or novel, only to find hidden treasures. We can stare into space or into the inner sanctums of the eternally beautiful. We can contemplate the beyond, the beyond that both exists beyond our bodies and our minds, and the one that may be their unifying factor.
We can furthermore follow the counsel of Ficino when he appraised how to perceive what arises both in our internal view and our external perceptions: “Do not merely look, but reflect in the soul.”
Have a beautifully reflective week!
xxStephanie
* Jupiter in Gemini makes a square aspect to the Moon while Neptune in Pisces conjoins (unites) with the Moon.
PS. On Sunday, we welcome the Autumnal Equinox—fall in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern Hemisphere. This turning point brings us to ponder equality, balance, and harmony, some of the significant themes that will be heralded during the next month, as the Sun sashays through the zodiac sign of Libra.
Astrological Highlights
September 16: Mars/Lunar Node Square
September 17: Pisces Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
September 18: Mercury/Saturn Opposition
September 19: Sun/Uranus Trine
September 20: Sun/Neptune Opposition
September 21: Mercury/Jupiter Square
September 22: Sun/Pluto Trine; Sun enters Libra (Equinox); Venus enters Scorpio; Venus/Pluto Square
All days reflect Eastern Daylight Time (-4 hours GMT)
Photos: Galina Nelyubova, Allec Gomes, and Pawel Czerwinski, all via Unsplash