Full Moon in Capricorn

(Otherworld - Andrew Wyeth)

This is tomorrow, the 12th July, around 12:30 pm GMT.

Full moons signify culminations or endings. This particular full moon is a real exciting one, with an end-of-era feel about it. Big shifts are underway! It's a “one door closes, another door opens” scenario.

Specifically, the issues that are being wrapped up relate to old family issues, old emotional dependencies and baggage, old power hierarchies.

Some Morrissey. Don't much like this song, but it expresses the mood.

“Break up the family, let's begin to live our lives.”

Time to shut the door on something old and outworn in your life...some closet full of rotting family mementos and clothes you wore 10 years ago. Fiery new portals are opening all around: opportunities for new alliances, creativity and self-expression, fun and mayhem.

But you can't step through a fiery portal of fun and mayhem carrying all your old crap and your parents' old crap and their parents' old crap...that doesn't work.

So what is the story here? We have a cardinal grand cross again, but it's looser this time than the ones we've been dealing with all summer. So tension is still in effect, but it's starting to break up.

We also have a grand water trine involving the sun, Saturn and Chiron. It actually makes a kite formation with the sun-moon opposition as the axis.

So we are looking at jagged tension, drama and power struggles via the grand cross. But also inward emotional strength and deep feeling via the grand water trine.

Plus we have some madcap social stuff going on: Venus and Mercury in Gemini trining Mars and the north node in Libra. That's easy communication, mental energy, lots of romantic options, excitement.

All in all, a big weekend! If you have scores to settle, this is the right time to settle them. And hopefully without too much ugliness either. There'll be plenty of emotional restraint available, and shiny new doors opening for every door that's closing.

Underlining this theme of shifts and endings, we have three major shifts happening in the weeks after the full moon, leading up to a brash new moon in Leo on the 26th July.

First Jupiter switches signs, then Saturn goes direct, and then Mars switches signs. This is what I mean by new doors opening.

Let's look at these changes.

Shift 1: Jupiter moves from Cancer to Leo on the 16th July. This is huge! Jupiter has been in Cancer for a year, so the emphasis this past year has been on home and family stuff. Nurturing those closest to you, dealing with turbulent emotions, taking care of your nest, makin' babies, wiping snotty little noses, lying around on the couch eating comfort food and watching boxed sets, etc etc.

But now our faith / hope / luck (Jupiter) shifts to Leo, which is about self-expression, drama, creativity, fiery self-regard, fun.

What this means is for the next year, it's not about dealing with your crazy family and their issues anymore... We've done that for a whole damn year and now it's over for another 12 years, thank god. The emphasis for the next year is going to be on YOU and how freaking amazing and special you are. How you are making a unique work of art of your own life. That's where your luck is going to be at.

Shift 2: Saturn goes direct in Scorpio on the 21st July after a retrograde period that started in early March. Karma comes due and starts being a bitch again.

If you've done your Saturn in Scorpio work and cut away the deadwood in your life, this will probably come as a relief. If you are still hanging onto crap that no longer serves you, it will hurt.

Saturn in Scorpio is about a kind of emotional ruthlessness – with yourself first and foremost. It's about taking responsibility for your pain. There are trade-offs to be made here for the sake of survival...the stakes are very high.

It's like, if you're walking around with a gangrenous leg...you are going to have to amputate the leg, and it will hurt like hell, and you'll have to learn to live differently. But if you don't amputate, this rotten thing attached to you is going to poison and kill you. It's that stark.

For 'gangrenous leg', substitute whatever in your life you know is rotten or unsound – it could be a relationship, a habit or addiction, a way of thinking. Bite the bullet.

(That expression comes from the days when wounded soldiers were given a bullet to bite while undergoing amputations without anesthesia. Very apt here.)

Shift 3: Mars will leave Libra and enter Scorpio early on the 26th July. He has been in Libra (the sign of his detriment) since December of last year – 8 damn months already. (He usually spends around 2 months in a sign.)

This was a long time for the planet of raw male energy and war to be stuck in the sign of peace and social harmony....like forcing Mike Tyson to sit around drinking tea in a never-ending BBC regency drama. And his stay in Libra was made even more fraught by the cardinal t-squares and crosses he got involved in there. Just a very drawn-out and frustrating time.

Well anyway, that's nearly done and he's moving out... to Scorpio, which is more his style. We go from passive aggression, enforced politeness, metrosexuality and wussiness to...film noir. Mars in Scorpio is a private dick (ahem) out of film noir: obsessive, secretive, probing, boiling with concealed passion.

Here is Mars in Libra:

And this is what he looks like in Scorpio:

And I know which of the above pictures I'd be happier in, if I were Mars.

--So anyway, these big shifts are underway and you'll feel it. The full moon tomorrow represents the last stand of the issues we've been dealing with all this summer – and really since the start of the year. Look back to the new moon in Capricorn in January and think about what you've been slogging through since then. Time to draw a line under all that stuff and move on.

--OK, I could leave it at that, but I'll write a little more background on the full moon tomorrow. The sun at 20 degrees Cancer will be facing off against the moon at 20 degrees Capricorn. 

Capricorn is about the old order: the tried and true. Authority, stability, duty, responsibility, following the rules. And Cancer is about home and family, roots, nurturance, emotions, the past.

They are also about public life vs private life: Capricorn is the outward image or persona, and Cancer is the inner world. Career and worldly status vs. home and family life.

They are very 'parental' signs: Capricorn is patriarchal, and Cancer matriarchal. Ideally these polarities should work together: the point about polarities is they are two sides of the same thing, requiring each other. So Capricorn's rules and discipline can turn into cruelty if they don't originate from a Cancerian will to nurture and protect. And Cancer can get lost in emotional turbulence and sentimentality without a dose of Capricorn's restraint and pragmatism.

Anyway, Pluto in Capricorn is widely conjunct this full moon, meaning part of what's lit up here is the corruption and abuse underlying the old, patriarchal order. And the sun in Cancer is applying into a conjunction with Jupiter in Cancer, meaning truth (Jupiter) is on the private, emotional side of the equation. And these poles are bound into a grand cross involving Uranus in Aries (individual revolt) and Mars in Libra (fighting for justice).

We have been dealing with this scenario for awhile, and this is just another iteration of it. One way of translating it is to say that it represents a stand-off. The corrupt old forces of outer power / authority / respectability / status... vs. your own inner emotional truth.

Pretty tense. Again, Jupiter (luck) is on the side of the inner truth stuff, so I would pay attention to that. If you have some kind of stand-off in your life between what is expected of you, what you 'should' do and what you truly feel...well your own feelings are the thing to trust here, of course.

But with a caveat: restraint and an awareness of limits are called for. There are responsibilities to be attended to even if you don't like it.

The sun and Jupiter in Cancer are disposited by the moon in Capricorn, which represents emotional containment. Don't go spilling your messy emotions all over the place...now's not the time. Try to be realistic, pragmatic and disciplined about what you feel and what you need.

Bearing this out, we are moving into a conjunction between Mars in Libra and the north node, exact on the 14th. The story for the next few weeks is still about enacting a balance, fighting for fairness and right relationship.

A full moon is a balancing act really: you have two opposing themes (in this case Cancer and Capricorn) that must be reconciled. Hopefully in yourself: the point of all this astrology stuff is self-understanding. Otherwise you mindlessly play out one side of the equation and someone else comes along to play the other side and it's just a battle of puppets.

The real work is this alchemical thing of reconciling the opposites within yourself. This is tricky and takes a lot of awareness. And it's also always a work in progress: you have to keep at it forever. But ultimately there's no other way to be free.

With this full moon, we're dealing with these parental signs, Cancer and Capricorn, and a conflict between emotional truth and practical necessity. And then Jupiter moves from Cancer (which is about the undertow of childhood, mama and the past) to Leo (which is about the self, YOU in all your glory). And we have Saturn going direct in Scorpio, which is about the sloughing off of an old skin.

So I think the story here is about taking responsibility, becoming your own authority, your own parental figure – and that means you rely on what you know to be true deep down, not what the powers that be try to force down your throat. 

And also you get rid of the psychological baggage of the past: the stuff you can't bring through the fiery portal. Your granny's lovely tablecloths, moldering in the attic; your father's sense of inadequacy; your mother's rage; whatever. It's not yours and you don't have to carry it anymore. Something new is trying to be born - your life, maybe. 

(Yeah. Always.)

We are the sons of no-one, bastards of young!

And here is some Tsunami. I used to listen to this when I was a teenager. Sitting in my room, waiting for my real life to start - ha.