New Moon in Pisces Conjunct Neptune, Pallas Athene, and Chiron: Carving Out Pisces for the Aquarian Era

February 19 - Sun enters Pisces at 12:18 a.m. Central
February 21 - New Moon at 2 degrees Pisces at 4:35 p.m. conjunct Neptune, Pallas Athene, and Chiron

This is the first Pisces New Moon of the Neptune in Pisces transit, and it falls smack dab between Neptune at zero Pisces and Pallas Athene and Chiron at 3 and 4 degrees Pisces, forming a tight stellium.

Our luminaries the Sun and Moon come together in New Moon conjunction, burning away some of the confusion, listlessness, and pain related to what's come before, dropping it like a cloak before drawing aside a new curtain and illuminating a new Pisces entrance way.

At the points where the burden of awareness has been too great, where we could not take another step under its paralyzing weight, we're released.

But we have to want it, and we have to be willing to go for it.

To survive emotionally and psychically now, knowing all we know, feeling all we feel, seeing all we see, we have to get out from under the most suffocating weight of it. The outpouring flow of the compassionate heart must be gently stemmed, moving into a place where to love and feel does not mean the sacrifice of personal health and safety.

Here, we step into a smart, new expression of Pisces, fully aware of the context of the times and of our context within them.

New Moons bring an opening into a new expression of the sign in which they fall. In the case of this New Moon at 2 degrees Pisces conjunct Neptune, which is just settling back in to the sign of the fishes, the opening is more vast than we can immediately comprehend. We're opening here into a new expression of Pisces for the astrological Aquarian era, closing the door, gently or with a slam and a deadbolt, on many prior expressions, many prior patterns, many prior karmic loops**.

The transit and retrograde of Mars through Virgo, moving to a mid-April opposition to this New Moon point and Neptune in Pisces, assist us in the process. We're picking through, analyzing, removing from the expression of the sign anything redundant, bloated, draining, past its prime. We apply the stinging Virgoan antiseptic, starting to create function in the sign of Pisces in areas where there has for too long been only dysfunction. We also apply the healing Piscean understanding of the way it all works together, of the ways it's shared, bringing new life to areas that have remained sorely isolated, neglected, outside the fold.

Wounded healer Chiron is here, and so is pain. A more in-depth treatment of this placement can be found here: Chiron, May We Pass? from February 18, 2011.

The intense levels of psychic pain held at this point in human history, collectively left denied and unvoiced, truly have the potential to do us in. The psychic backwash drops over us in waves, often without warning, threatening to drag us under. The homeless, the alcoholics, the addicts, the mentally ill, the depressed, the prostituted, the murdered, the missing are symbols of this unaddressed psychic pain and the resulting dysfunction, symptomatic of deeper roots. They've done all they can, said all they can, and still most don't see the connections.

It seeps into suburbia, into condo buildings, into schools and offices, and still people won't put their fingers on it.

Chiron transits Pisces until 2019. The first half of the Neptune transit through Pisces is coloured strongly by this body out in front in the sign.

"There is no easy answer, just as there was no easy answer for Chiron's wound. No magic pill makes it all better. We're past the point where concessions and tokenism soothe in any form. We don't want to be thrown another bone.

Until the underlying wounding dynamics are truly addressed, rectified, discontinued, no long-term healing is possible. We're just treating symptoms.

And the army of people bleating about victim consciousness and creating your own reality works very effectively, moving us further from the depth of understanding of power dynamics and structures on this planet that would get us to the true healing points. Every flippant use of those concepts is another pound of pressure pinning Sedna down, suffering in betrayal on the ocean floor."

Before forgiveness, we need to understand the underlying dynamics, give them name, give them voice, change them, ensure they don't continue.

Before healing, we need to get to the roots, working for complete systemic change rather than just anesthetizing, masking symptoms and calling it healing.

Before the victimization cycles can end, we need to understand why these damaging cycles have been held in place for so long and why they continue to be reinforced. Who benefits from them and who would prefer things go on just as they have? We don't get rid of "victims" until we alter the systems and dynamics that benefit from victimization, and that requires a shift from blaming people for their circumstances to a focus and analysis of the power dynamics on a socio-political level.

With Pallas Athene so prominent at this Pisces New Moon, there is a battle going on for our psychic space. A ferocious reclamation is necessary here, as we battle to remove the ropey, sinewy arms that invade and drain, diverting the power of the feminine psychic force with idiocy about appearance and weight and celebrities and money and status symbols and manufactured music and sports and how to find a mate in five easy steps.

The women of the world, in particular, have to call a spade a spade now, refusing to play the same, old, look-the-other-way games.

With this New Moon, we open into a new Piscean infusion. We come back to Pisces in certain ways, letting it seep again into our pores, letting it lift our eyes again to the glorious wonder of it all after a stretch of years (during the Uranus in Pisces - Neptune in Aquarius mutual reception) when the focus has been strongly on Aquarius and the shift to astrological Aquarian era.

For the past eight years, the focus has been intensely on the transition. What to leave behind with a soft, sweet kiss, what to battle our way out of tooth and nail, and what to carry ahead with us.

What do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind: this has been a difficult consideration. But Neptune has now slid beyond the last impressions of the mutual reception, entering new territory in Pisces by the end of this month, and we've made our choices. It has become clear - or clearer. We've moved through the grief, the confusion, the catatonia, and we're coming out the other side - because we have to. We're needed. We go on from here.

Neptune is in its own sign now, having left Aquarius February 3, and we open into this clear conduit for Piscean understanding, for the permeation of the wondrous spirit of it all, for the experience of the puzzle piece connections that show us how it fits together.

With this New Moon, we get our new Piscean sea legs. Pisces for the Aquarian era.

We don't forget. We don't deny. We don't sever from us all that has come before and all that is happening now. This would only increase the psychic struggle. We take the wonder and the pain and the difficulty and the beauty with us. But we don't carry it anymore as a hopeless burden, as endless, roiling suffering.

What has gone on, what has been done, is known. We know and feel what humanity, what all living things on this planet, have suffered, have endured. We know what we suffer and endure now. We move forward with it shared among us, no one isolated in its pain and difficulty. It's part of us.

But again now, we move this story forward.


** A karmic loop is a scenario that plays out in a person's life over and over again with only slightly different circumstances, spitting the person out repeatedly in close to the same spot with close to the same results. It's generally something that plays on weak spots or patterns, and after a loop has been spotted, work can be done to change behaviour/patterns/decisions in order to come up with a different outcome and hopefully break the cycle.

Karmic loops can be related to any astrological body or point, but at the end of the astrological Piscean era, there are many Piscean/Neptunian karmic loops to be broken, in particular. One thing that makes these loops tricky is that they often involve collective dynamics and patterns and their results. It's not strictly personal issues we're working through, and the collective issues are very, very potent and confounding at times since we can't root them solely back to ourselves.