The next Portal is an invisible Lunar Eclipse, at half-past 9pm PDT on Friday May 24. Well, it may not be completely invisible if you’re a Cat, but the Earth’s shadow makes only the faintest of glancing blows on the edge of the Moon’s disk. It occurs at 5 of Sagittarius, “An old Owl sits alone on the branch of a large Tree.” Rudhyar’s take is a giggle: “A poised and wise approach to existence based on a clear perception of Unconscious factors and their operation” – as if we were doing our Juno-Nodes T-Square homework! And of course it’s the Blooming of the Lunar Cycle that began at the Annular Eclipse two weeks ago.
More important, though, is that the Full Moon (Eclipse) makes a close T-Square (Mastery through Challenge) with Neptune (our Relationship with the GodHead and the GoddessHeart). The most important part of any T-Square is the Vacancy that would make it into a Grand Cross, because this is the part that we have to Consciously provide in order to complete the Circle and bring it into Balance. The Vacancy is 5 degrees of Virgo, “A person becoming aware of Nature Spirits and normally unseen spiritual agencies,” which Rudhyar extends as “The opening of new levels of consciousness.” The 5-Virgo reading is independent of the fact that it’s a Neptune T-Square – which amounts to an affirmation. In other words, keep your (third) eye open for Awareness of any New Patterns!
Related Eclipses recur in an 18-year “Saros” Cycle. The first and last Eclipses in a Cycle are glancing blows like this one. Eighteen years later a related Eclipse will be slightly more visible, and so on and so on, until one or more of the Eclipses is finally Total, or at least Annular. For instance, the Cycle that the recent Annular Solar Eclipse occupies saw it’s first, glancing-blow Eclipse in 1472, twenty years before the Taino People of the Bahamas, much to their later chagrin, discovered European Colonists. That Cycle doesn’t finish until the year 2716.
The newsworthy thing about Portal 5.24 is that it Initiates a new Saros Cycle! Initiation of a new Eclipse Cycle hasn’t occurred in 30 years, and it’ll be 47 years hence before it occurs again – most of us will witness only a few of these Initiations in a lifetime, at least until the Singularity. This new Cycle will see related Eclipses every 18 years until the year 3275 – a millennium and a quarter of another! The first Total Lunar Eclipse in the Cycle won’t happen until 2572.
All of which is to say, this Eclipse…
- Is virtually Invisible (as is, for most of us most of the time, Spirit),
- Is the blossoming of a Lunar Cycle about The awareness of spiritual forces at work (see The Next Eclipse),
- Occurs in a degree representing a poised and wise approach to existence based on a clear perception of Unconscious factors and their operation,
- Makes a T-Square with Neptune, aka our Relationship with Spirit,
- Triggers a Vacancy with a degree symbolizing the opening of new levels of consciousness,
- Initiates a brand new 1,262-year Eclipse Cycle!
Uh, sounds like kind of a Big Deal, eh?
And there’s more. Remember those two other T-Squares? Juno with the Nodes, and Uranus with Pluto and Vesta? At the Full Moon/Invisible Eclipse, there are two Quintile Yods (Learning Opportunities) formed. One we know about already, the ongoing North-Node QYod with Uranus and Jupiter (expanding and aligning our Soul Connection, our Mission, and our Lifestyle). The second one is transitory – a Vesta QYod with Juno and the Moon (triggering a realignment of our Unconscious Identity to concur with our Heart’s view of what’s Sacred).
This second Quintile Yod makes a good map for the span of Portal 5.24 – the QYod will be in effect for about nine hours beginning about 7pm PDT on Friday May 24.
In other words, the two Quintile Yods link the focus of each of the T-Squares to a corner of the other – Juno to Vesta, and Uranus to North Node. So each T-Square is a heuristic for the other – our rededication to the Sacred facilitates the transformation of our Unconscious Identity, as our rededication to our Yintegrity takes us to our Mission! While it might seem like these connections are obvious, they’re otherwise-independent Energies. The fact that the astrological alignment reinforces their natural affinities amplifies their Power and Significance.
Personally, I regard Eclipses as “simply” enhanced Oppositions – Angles of Awareness that illuminate by absence Patterns that otherwise blend with the background, hence expanding our Consciousness. Consciousness grows by exactly that process – differentiation, not be discovery. Critically important to the evolution of the Species in other words. But most of the Fear and Loathing that surrounds Eclipses is political – when someone tries to impress you with Eclipse tales, they’re mostly trying to manipulate you. It works because until Humans knew that Columbus would get found by the Taino before he fell off the Edge, Eclipses were simply terrifying – imagine a Total Solar Eclipse occurring if you had no idea what it was all about!
The ability to predict Eclipses came long before the general understanding of how Planetary and Lunar Shadows moved around. During the intervening span astrologers collaborated with despotic manipulation of the resulting Terror. This particular Eclipse seems like a Big Deal because it assembles a long list of meaningful correlates, not because it’s an Eclipse. Tapping Out or lovingly Sitting With any general Fear that Eclipses generate for you would be an excellent way to help the whole Spiritual Consciousness process that’s going on.
If you’d like to explore Eclipses further, http://www.universetoday.com/102262/the-birth-of-a-saros-this-weekends-hidden-eclipse/ and http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html would be good places to start.
Charoite would be an appropriate Crystal to contemplate during any bootstrapping of Consciousness and Spiritual Awareness.
jbuss Astrology 