Shadow ‘scopes are horoscopes that hold space for the darker side of your life, and find the redemptive value in the daily awkwardness & agony. This week they’re especially weepy, with the Pisces New Moon.
ARIES
Warriors with eyes all over their heads gaze on the sunset, plundering forward into their new territory thirsting for fresh blood. Looking back behind their shoulders, they can’t help but look upon the blood already shed over the ground from the battle hard-won. The question is whether there’s still a larger war to fight, to use all of the energy of freshness and boundaries that limit-giving Saturn affords you during this time of conspicuous new beginnings. Sounding the cry, the resonance of your voice could lift the sun out of the belly of the underworld itself. As your strident cries carve out the boundaries of this fresh start and your followers shake in awe and terror, you must take stock of the balance between sunset and sunrise: starting something new and reflecting melancholically aren’t mutually exclusive; they feed each other and must hang in balance. Allowing people to grieve their losses, you march forward, grieving a few of your own while holding your arms out in front of the sun. Take a breath. You know building a new village on the land is possible.
TAURUS
As you gaze over your shoulder, little relics from deep within the past seem to emerge out of the sea behind you: jewelry boxes, splintered chairs, hand grenades your grandparents used in the war, bottles of Scotch. The detritus of addiction moves into your orbit as you see all of the fresh starts within the hidden stories of your ancestors coming toward you to help you realize the hidden sources of power that you possess in this moment. Though you may feel lost at sea, and may feel at times that you’re drowning in the hiddenness of what was possible and what was actual, and what IS possible and what IS actual, you’re actually becoming more able to discern what you can use from the flotsam. Instability and disorder have been the beginning of your initiation during the last couple of years, and as you continue to lean into the disequilibrium, you discover paradoxical balance: the sniveling inner gremlins begin to drink from the old family stories so that those stories are no longer power-drains on you.
GEMINI
You discover this New Moon that you arrive at a party of your circle of friends only to discover that the circle itself has turned into a group of wild beasts. The lions, tigers, bears and serpents demand that you dance with them, and with your light-hearted, harlequinesque nature, you dance joyfully, gliding across the currents of transformation. But there’s dread lurking in the background: wherefore did this transformation occur? Something arises out of the middle of that friendship circle, a new beginning of an initiation into your primordial animalistic nature. The sores of civilization, including disease, allergy, and plain old city soot, seem to be coughed out of the center of this group dynamic, and only your light-hearted curiosity can expel any of its lasting impacts from hanging over the clan. The initiation lies in shedding the armor of civilization and being at once light-on-your-feet and guttural, lower-body, in your connection with the earth. You all roar together, and within your respective domains, you breathe fire, knowing that you will only gain the collective insight if you’re willing to temporarily leave behind the civil trappings you once held dear.
CANCER
When you arrive at your temple, and when your focus presses upon the building, underneath the stone, dark hands cause cracks in the foundation. It seems the old king and queen, overthrown, reach up to rise again, disturbing the already-claustrophobic atmosphere. But this is not an atmos-FEARic situation: you find yourself standing serene within the temple and it becomes a vessel for your indestructibility. You endure the quakes of the foundation with an ease you had not previously known. The old, dead despots are demanding that their mission in the world (as it had existed in their old lives) be seen anew during this time. They want the boundaries of how their contribution had benefited society expanded, so that people can see their legacy in a fresh light. Hint: this has to do with you and your contributions as well. You might have done certain things that can’t be undone, but the way people see your contributions and the way you view your mission is due for a fresh start. This cosmic coup and rise of the dead royalty is the beginning of reframing the value of your social contributions, and after falling through the cracks of the structure, your vessel carries you to a new land where your unique contributions are unwaveringly valued by both yourself and others.
LEO
You want it all, and your mask of power lands you in an ivory tower surrounded by heaps of dusty books, seeming to counsel you. In the moment when a ray of light pierces your chest and you find yourself staring into an apparition of a new land, you wonder what it’s all about. The sweat on your brow begins to melt your pride away. All pie-in-the-sky pronouncements from the past echo in the air, and when you travel downstairs to see that on the throne sits another King, Queen, or Qing, you run away from your domain, finding that the only thing left to do is to go toward the apparition of the new land that you saw earlier. You travel faster than your legs can carry you, and, hint, hint: the labor and the toil of the journey is what counts. Though the dust and light were gateways, the fresh start you were looking for wasn’t in the collection of the books,. The fresh start was what those artifacts catalyzed in your mind and spirit: the eruption of pride, the sweat of wanting to do the real work of fleeing fossilized sources of fake strength. Now, you venture forth toward the true nobility of humility and fresh mind.
VIRGO
Frequently ill-at-ease with new bold starts, this New Moon you crawl toward this unforeseen territory on all fours in a deep trench during a thunderstorm. In the trenches there’s an unexpected drop-off, and you find yourself thrown into a ceiling vault that requires more crawling in order to reach the light. Once you reach the light, a smoldering lover appears—or is it an ex-lover?—cross-legged, with a wry smile, asking you to unbutton their blouse. Complying makes you excited and uncomfortable: how could claustrophobia, survival, and bodily intimacy be so intertwined? The simultaneous expertise about the body and discomfort with raw physicality is an ongoing paradox that makes you charismatic and puzzling, Virgo, but it’s okay: going down there to discover merging, you discover you like the hag and the gnomish version of your ex-lover, too, and that it’s just these grotesque appearances that empower you to get primal with them. Maybe that shape-shifting source of temptation down there isn’t a person: maybe it’s an object, an account, a bill, or the fertile soil of your imagination itself, but either way, after you’ve kissed it, the light carries you both to a new place you need to create your life.
LIBRA
Rivals and jilted lovers with pouting lips and swords pop out of the shadows and start speaking to you in invented languages, and it seems at first as though they’re offering to take you for a ride. A ride with your rival? Hopping on a train with an ex? The scales seem to tip toward a fresh perspective on those who don’t seem to be balanced people in your life, but who thrust you in the direction of quick, direct, fiery independence that is the counterpoint of your comfort zone. When you hop on board with these flaming enemies or frenemies, it might seem at first that you’re descending to the ninth gate of hell, but you’re actually careening toward the balance that you truly seek: a fresh geographic look at the way you can be and live with others with passion, leadership and diplomacy. You might create a new home together, with plenty of space to joust, or you might discover that you can live in the middle of the ring of fire anew, quietly while they try unsuccessfully to accost you from the outside. If you can apply these ideas toward arguing with yourself this week, the empty side of the map of your soul will start to fill in.
SCORPIO
In the middle of your daily routine there is a schism when time seems to stop and a new impassioned approach to time seems to begin. It’s a gap, a reddened void in which integration is obliterated and only the unknown prevails. If you are able to short-circuit the tight control around your daily sources of power you hold dear, this gap becomes your friend, and teetering on the edge of the day’s schism and its order gives you strength to charge forward. When you lean into the schism of the order of the day you might find sobbing hypochondriacs, laughing nurses, used containers for bodily fluids, post-surgery smells, all the while knowing that the whole time, a reset of time’s hierarchy is available to you. If you can cry with the cries and find a new frequency in your voice, if you can laugh with the laughs and discover a fresh depth of laughter independently of the claims of healthful hierarchy, if you can curiously contact used containers without immediately sanitizing them, the breakage in time turns you toward the right outlet, that of the edge of dirtiness and collapse. It is only on this edge that the creation of taken-for-granted routine becomes possible, and once that daily order becomes fossilized, the ground opens you again to the sniveling rejects of absolute power.
SAGITTARIUS
All the children you didn’t realize were yours stand in a line holding shot glasses full of whiskey and demand you pay attention to them. You don’t love being held down, so thinking of your offspring wasn’t exactly high on your list, but those born with your DNA running through their bodies and souls offer you the opportunity to take a fresh perspective toward what has grown as a result of your creativity. It’s not an opportunity for you to escape, but to notice anew—bursts of reflection, phantasms, inner beings and creatures that show you what the consequences of your actions and creations look like. They appear on a patch of land that had been previously hidden to you, and it’s through your willingness to clink glasses with them—with those born as a result of your actions—that the boldness to climb the next mountain arises. It’s wise to listen, to feel Youth-As-External, rather than hoarding eternal youth into your own mindset, so that your perspective can be humble, fresh, and other-directed, rather than self-centered. Your past creativity causes joy and pain, and the discomfort of feeling the dissonance of joy and pain as a result of your past risks is what propels you into new territory now.
CAPRICORN
All the family critters climb out from under the bed, some of them young, some of them old, but all of them dipping into the pond of your murky memory-bank, almost as if fishermen trying to catch the one recollection from the school of fish in your memories that will give both them and you the key to nourishment. The nourishment they’re seeking from catching of the fish of your memories is that which will nourish you and the generations to follow. Reaching into the dark waters of your bloodline, the swarms of fish encircle your desire to catch the emotional anchor. It will not be easy, they tell you, for we all come as one, and you will need to take all the agents of feeling into account before you go ahead with your agenda. The discovery of this school of fish, of this ecosystem of recollection, is what you need to spend time with, growing some gills yourself. The new pieces of clarity emerge from the willingness to be surrounded by those immediately reaching into your emotional space and those deep within the transparent vessels of feeling from the past. Your ability to hold both of these, while being in the center and in your center, invigorates your strength as a leader and protector.
AQUARIUS
Brothers, sisters, and lapses in communication, wires going haywire, sparks flying and missed connections and deviously misinterpreted words bring your consciousness down into a knot of cords, but it’s in these cords that you find out how to untangle yourself, Aquarius. It’s only in inhabiting the discordant, tangled space, an exaggeration of your state of being curled up in a ball of ideas, where you untangle yourself and feel spacious in your world again. As you see the overwhelm of all the messages trying to get through, and recognize the space of disorder, you are able to toss the pine needles, little by little, off the bundle of knotted wire and hear each message clearly, determining what is worth addressing and what isn’t worth your energy right now. First curling up in a fetal position at the center, then splaying out like a Vitruvian man, clarity arises and your fraternal connections, as well as the fraternity of all the units of communication show you gratitude.
PISCES
Some goods feel stolen, some relics seem to have grown mold and dust; either way, your possessions feel not-quite-yours, Pisces. But something underneath the material things that had previously defined a certain aspect of your life comes to the forefront of your awareness: the space around those objects, and the ability of your psyche to see the territory available to you to discover new births and the thrust of your being toward the anticipation of the next instance of harmonious surges of creation with the world’s tides. It’s as if you stand as a new ruler, standing over your corrupted possessions, but you are not a ruler of egomania. Rather, your arms extend to the rain and lightning, which kiss your fingertips. The abundance of wiggle-room in the world’s creation place propels you to discover the moment after your customary dissolving: recovering the sight of the fertile land and its potential, knowing that resources can regenerate with the help of your compassion and inspiration. Though a tinge of sadness strikes you as you gaze at your items, you harness your power of empathy for the rest of the world, and your connection to true resources knows no bounds.
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