Full Moon in Pisces

(Detail from Van der Weyden's Descent From the Cross)

This is exact on Tuesday, the 9th September around 2:30 am (GMT).

The moon will be at 16 degrees Pisces, conjunct Chiron and opposing the sun in Virgo.

A Pisces moon is sensitive and empathetic, with a lack of clear boundaries between self and other... and Chiron represents a wound that will not heal. So the emotional tone described by this full moon is one of painful sensitivity for the suffering of all existence. Boundless empathy.

We are also moving into an opposition between Venus and Neptune, exact on the 10th September. It's an aspect known for romantic delusion, pining, unrequited love. Also spiritual longing and artistic creativity.

The emotional tone of these skies is very idealistic, sensitive, dreamy and wounded overall.

The nice thing is, there are practical, helpful things you can DO with all this sensitivity and empathy. The sun in in Virgo, sign of the dedicated nurse, the selfless servant. Virgo is happiest when there's a job to be done, a problem to be solved, a bandage to be applied, someone to be helped.

The themes here are the classic Virgo-Pisces ones of compassion, service, sacrifice and healing. “Serve or suffer”, the motto of this axis, applies. If you're feeling bad, focusing your energy on something you can do for others is the quickest way to feel better.

That said, suffering may be hard to avoid. with the moon conjunct Chiron and also a cardinal t-square between Uranus, Pluto, and Mercury in Libra. Situations are weighty and difficult, on a mental level as well as an emotional one. Remember last month's new moon in Virgo? We are still clearing out the Augean stables - there is still plenty of work to be done.

I'm thinking of the Ebola health workers again...

Or of the old concept of the sin-eater, a person who ritually absolved the dead of their sins.

These are forms of human sacrifice. Or compassion (the word comes for the Latin for “suffering with”).

From Vivre sa Vie.

Beware of what the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa called “idiot compassion” (another word for which is “enabling”). What's required here is a very sharp, pragmatic, purposeful kind of compassion. Like a “cordon sanitaire”.

Bearing this out, we have Saturn in Scorpio sextiling the Virgo sun and trining the Pisces moon. Saturn in Scorpio is a no-bullshit, surgical energy that is best used for removing what's rotten or diseased from your life.

The whole setup reminds me of a line from T.S. Eliot about “the sharp compassion of the healer's art”:

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart."

Chiron is often referred to as the 'wounded healer'. In the mythology, he was a healer and a teacher of heroes. But he was hit by a poisoned arrow during one of Hercules' escapades and proved unable to heal himself, for all his knowledge.

The archetype of the wounded healer goes back a long way. In classical shamanism, initiates were called to healing via trauma and illness. The explanation was that the spirits tormented people until they accepted the calling to become a healer.

Accepting the call meant the death of the ego – 'shamanic sickness' often ends with the sick person's vision of death and physical dismemberment, which is experienced as literal. And there follows the acceptance of a new mode of living, and a liminal social position – one foot in the everyday world, one foot in the otherworld. Your life doesn't really belong to you anymore – you become a channel between the worlds, an instrument. Not an easy position.

This pattern of initiation holds across cultures. The Buddha was so traumatized by his apprehension of the truth of suffering that he left his comfortable life and entered into austerities that nearly killed him – and his final realization was a kind of death. Jesus was an itinerant faith healer who was literally tortured to death before attaining god-status. Odin hung himself from a tree for nine days and nights in order to gain knowledge. Muhammed nearly killed himself after his initial revelation...and then he spent three years in a deep depression. Inanna went down to hell and was stripped of her finery and even her skin, hung for dead on a meat-hook. Etc, etc...

The message of all these traditions is: there's no real power or wisdom without the acceptance of suffering. You gain the ability to help others only by making your own wounds conscious. But bringing those wounds to consciousness can be very painful and difficult, and there's no going back to your old life... no 'healing' of what has been broken. It stays broken.

But that brokenness, that loss...is also the source of the ability to empathise with others, and to help them.

Chogyam Trungpa again:
"To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy."

Ok, enough writing. Let's just play some videos. Under these skies, music and art make more sense than any amount of  talking or explaining...

Making art is a good use of this energy, by the way. Art is a form of catharsis or purgation, and can heal.

Another by Nina Nastasia:

And here are a few for Venus-Neptune. Bollywood has always been great at portraying Venus-Neptune (unreachable glamour, impossible love, spiritual longing).

--Worth noting: the actresses in these films were dying in real life. Madhubala of a hole in her heart, Meena Kumari of alcoholic cirrhosis. Very fitting, for Moon-Chiron in Pisces: they were tragedy queens. The boundary between life and art was very porous for these women.

--And here is one that is just kinda silly. I don't get what is happening in this video at all, but it's fun...

Anyway, "a heart that hurts is a heart that works" is a good slogan for this full moon.