Full Moon In Pisces

This is tomorrow morning – the 6th September, 7 am GMT.

We have Mercury stationing direct the day before it, on the exact degree of last month's big solar eclipse in Leo (21st August). So this full moon is a mental revisiting of whatever was going on for you around the time of that eclipse.

And not just mental. This is a full moon in super-emo Pisces, conjuct super-emo Neptune. Suffice it to say, there will be plenty of super-emo, strange, magical stuff happening. The floodgates will be open, for good or ill.

I think for good, not ill. It looks nice to me – spiritual and deep. A good time to focus inward and purify your heart, to forgive, to be compassionate, to have faith in life. To recover radical innocence, per Yeats:

“[...] all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will”

Recall, the theme of the eclipse (and of the past two months, basically) has been Leo stuff – creativity, generosity, self-expression, pride, bravery, joy, romance. This sky has been forcing us to ask ourselves how to bring more joy and aliveness into our lives; how to live with heart.  And as it was eclipse season, great changes were demanded.

We're past the great changes and intensities of eclipse season now. This month is more a matter of getting on with the new order of things – our next new moon will be in Virgo, and within a couple of weeks we're going to have all the personal planets (Mercury, Mars and Venus) in Virgo. This is a lot of detail-oriented, systematic, humble, relentlessly pragmatic energy – it's going to be a great month for attending to practical matters and getting things done.

But before we get there, we have this gentle emotional catharsis: this dreamy, romantic, teary, spiritual full moon in Pisces, where we look back with nostalgia, gratitude, and maybe regret at the summer just past - and come to terms with it. It's a feeling the Japanese call mono no aware  – an acute awareness of the impermanence of life in the midst of the everyday.

I'm going to quote Phillip Larkin's “Sad Steps” in its entirety, because it fits, and because Pisces moons are for poetry:

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.


You see the speaker move from sentimental tropes about the moon to a personal vision that's very clinical and bleak, but deeply felt? I think it's a good resolution of the Pisces/Virgo polarity (feeling vs. reason): it's possible to feel deeply without being self-indulgent; it's possible to see clearly without being cold. That's the kind of balancing act that's called for here.

This full moon looks great for creating art, music, poetry. Also for letting go of things – remember full moons are about endings. It's potentially very beautiful and profound, like a wistful cat.

Wistful cat

But Pisces can also be full of delusion, self-pity, addiction and victim shit – Pisces is the incurable drunk who calls you at 4 am to cry about all the terrible things other people have done to her. And with Neptune conjunct the moon, this is doubly the case here. There's a real potential for people to wallow in their self-created misery, and to try to drag others in too.

The antidote to this sodden emotional mess is Virgo. The north node was in Virgo for the past few years, and I got used to repeating the boring mantra: “Keep doing your Virgo!” It was about attending to practical matters in order to keep from sinking into self-destruction and despair.

The north node is now in Leo, but for the next couple of weeks, it's disposited by the sun in Virgo. So this month, the old advice applies – keep doing your Virgo, stay practical and focused on everyday tasks and routines in order to stave off existential misery.

The nice thing is, the north node is now in Leo, so there's a larger purpose to this Virgo stuff now. It's not just about staying functional and sane. It's about doing the practical work that needs to be done in order to create a life worth living – a life with more authenticity and joy in it.