Shadow ‘scopes are horoscopes that hold space for the darker side of your life, and find the redemptive value in the daily awkwardness & agony.
ARIES
Aries: Your enterprising nature tends to favor impulse over detail, and this New Moon comes as a rebirth of an orb of light out of the bowels of the underworld unto your desire to spin the wheels of new territories of knowledge. But whispers of scandal predominate: shreds of paper and documents from your past diplomatic failings are brought to the surface by ladies with upturned, hooked noses, and within the ridges of their noses your secrets of ill-spoken words run along in parchment spells.
Fear not, for these are the whispers of poorly made horror films presenting you with the void of primitive terror. You can only know the passion for fresh enterprises if you equally meet your most primordially fearful self —initiation through horrified encounters with gossip and shreds of detail you usually wouldn’t want to handle. The way to the grail of your fresh enterprises arrives through this encounter with forces that make you shudder, with chattering banshees shrieking about your scandals behind your back.
The trick is to know that there will always be all kinds of beings in every project you choose to undertake under any circumstance, and you will always find a fool. Know the fool that you are. Able to swim in the detail without becoming lost in your head, your pioneering spirit’s new inquisitive encounter with your weaknesses and vulnerabilities bolsters you.
TAURUS
Taurus: Money, money, money, graces you in a urgent way, especially the questions surrounding it, this New Moon, Taurus. It seems to make your world go round as you’re led into a den, a bed with velvet sheets surrounded by courtesans asking you where your values really lie. What do you value? You discover that everyone is too busy being chatterboxes to fully enjoy the fruits of your earnings with you, or that some lingering question around lack, the need to gather, and scattered resources, prevails in your psyche. How to stop the noise and settle down enough to fully enjoy your values?
Just as these lingering questions start to boil over into insight, a clown bursts in, throwing confetti all over the place, opening a trapdoor that shows you to what end your life is imploding and where it may head. The showering confetti tickles you, sending vibrations through your whole person, and it’s clear that this is no minor event: what began as a tiresome question surrounded by attractive gossipers culminates in a swift-shake-up forcing your head to turn in the direction of the true values aligned with the current density of your earthly person. While you don’t tend to like the swirling wheels of chaotic information, with a little bit of time and space for your mind, you will make the scattered-ness and the turbulent movement your bed into treasured pleasure.
GEMINI
Gemini: You may feel as though you’ve been like a dragon with human hands standing at the edge of a cliff, wringing away at washcloths, your fingers cracked and dirty with old blood. All the wringing out you’ve been doing, the labor with those hands and the even quicker labor with your notoriously quick mind, is really an initiation you’ve been going through to join heaven, earth and the lower depths. Your ability to transform and do what seem to be thankless, trivial tasks wearing the face of superficiality, actually represents a much larger struggle to gather divine energy into the sisterhood of which you’re an integral part. All the bullying and the lack of credit makes your dragon face downcast, looking lonely at your washcloth.
But don’t fret, for your guardian force lurks in the background, waiting to shoot its light into your place. At the tip of your finger is the new life script, which you alone hold the responsibility to write onto the sky to orient all who care to look. Your job is to feel love for even those who have not realized the extent of your sweat and toil—they haven’t realized it because, ever light-on-your-feet, you make it look so effortless. Big shifts come as a result of the blisters on the palms of your hands. Even if they don’t recognize that dragon-self, watch them be floored when on this dark moon, you make a full transformation into the sky-writing dragon, cleaning house of world view and writing a new script of how people will discern their views and information.
CANCER
Cancer: This New Moon, you’re shot through space toward a swampy, stinking wood full of fog. In recent weeks you’ve been the one responsible for helping other loved ones swim, and this time you’re forced into the rocket of your own psyche, suddenly flying and floating independently of your own volition, acquainting yourself with your dream life. Dreams are important, for it’s only possible to swim in the outer realms and manifest care for other if you can also swim in the interior planes, which are sometimes shocking. When you come to a clearing, a hairy, wild creature with a rounded back emerges from the pits and roars at the sky.
Within the roars you decipher, as though recollecting something you’ve long forgotten, the greetings of people from deep in your past, especially through the line of grandparents. Each plea, yelp and grunt contains a unique greeting for you, and while it’s hard to hold back your tears in this moment, it’s important to let them see your response, as they’re the ones that taught you how to swim.
As you make your response transparent (read: feel your feelings in response to the strange imagery going on in your dream and waking life), you see large fire-people dancing with hats far in the distance on the outer edges of the marshy forest. Recognizing them, too, as ancestors, you dance around the perimeter together and see that caring for others and self doesn’t mean locking yourself into a particular trajectory. It’s multidimensional and spiraling, and includes feeling weakened at times, too.
LEO
Leo: In the throes of laughter and stumbling dance moves within your friendship circle in a little lonely house, a dark figure enters and crashes the party. The dark figure announces he had just struck the hard ground with his staff, releasing thousands of pigeons and doves out of the ground and into the air. Suddenly, as he speaks, the doves form around your house, and you realize that the chatter you had engaged in with your friends was illusory; that you weren’t talking about the real thing with real people because everyone had skirted around the central topic: their wishes. You wondered why it hadn’t truly felt like you had been around your friends all this time: you’ve missed your heart’s desires, which now return to you in the doves encircling your house.
The doves send coos of love and beg you to let the valiance of your heart back in during your confinement, and in letting this valiance back in, your friends will reappear, your wishes transparent to you anew. You feel uneasy at the juxtaposition of a dark sorcerer and a dove crashing your ruminations on who your friends are and what you want in life, but sometimes, contrary to your spirit of total trust and loyalty, it takes a shady figure to let the river of devotional love rush back in through the barriers. Your home ground is instantly moistened as the resurgence of your wishes vitalize you; a red river floods your space of dejectedness and solitary drunken dancing with illusory friends, and you sound your lion’s roar to all shades and all doves, proclaiming that out of your intoxicated wishing arises the sustenance of the fraternity of humankind!
VIRGO
Virgo: Taken by a corn mother’s hand, you walk down the mountain and into the streets. Who is this mysterious old woman holding your hand insistently? In charge of crop and harvest, she wears rags and wrinkles of experience on her dry skin under her flowing silver hair. At first, you’re not sure you can trust her. She takes you quietly through the streets, and the only noise you can hear is your slowly-forming realization that she was once your mother. Perhaps, too, once your wife. The mothers are looking for quality time with you, she says. Between you and the old mothers has stood an angry child somehow, making you sheepish about spending time over lunch in a dark bar with anyone maternal in an older generation.
But as you enter a lounge smelling of stale beer and she lights up a cigarette across from you, demanding to hear all the gossip, you swallow your embarrassment over the accumulated, wasteful anger over the years, knowing that this embarrassment is healthy. Anger with older generations is not in itself wrong—it actually provides grist for the mill of your stepping into your executive functioning.
Like a razor, or the snapping open of a beer can, you harness your anger to carry out leadership tasks, and you greet your embarrassment at raging against the past mothers with a touch of humility: it’s ok that there’s an invisible screaming red-faced baby on your shoulder. When invited onto the cabaret stage, you sing an homage to all the mothers and fathers throughout time. Thank you for giving me anger, thank you for giving me embarrassment, thank you for mediating these two forces with humility.
LIBRA
Libra: Shot out into a light apparition of the scales of balance that you treasure, you nestle into one side of the symbol etched with light and find that a round-bellied, pointy-hatted professor cuddles up next to you. The feeling is warm, but unexpected: why are you cuddled up in this corner of the scales of justice with an affectionate academic, and are you trapped or was this by choice? Not to worry, he tells you—the reason we’re here is because you’ve stuck yourself in a particular idea of balance, tipped to one side of the scales, and now need to bust out of that construct with a burst of laughter through light.
As he speaks to you, mice appear from under your feet, rolling over each other, chatting, tickling your ankles. You and the professor laugh in high-pitched tones, and you feel some kind of mind-bubble burst: noise and laughter can come through too, what a relief! Balance is never static, wow! You begin to chatter with the mice before flinging them against luminous walls within the confines of the symbol in which you’ve trapped yourself, and as you and your beloved academic both clean the floor, you find yourself in a new place, on new ground. The floor is incredibly dirty, but the soles of your feet insatiably skate across it.
The chatter of all those critters, your laughter and the professor’s pointy-hatted giggles were all the vibrations needed to tip the scales in another direction. Or perhaps it was medicine to knock you off firm ideas of right and wrong altogether. The professor takes off his hat, reveals all along that he was a laughing drunkard, and you lick your own dirty feet.
SCORPIO
Scorpio: This New Moon awakens you to the smell of death, and you find yourself wandering around a charnel ground. While no immediate gore is in sight, you’re familiar with this particular stench, and you’ve been known to grow frustrated at how uncomfortable the rest of your human kin are with it. Not to fear: this time, though in the immediate vicinity of death, you are the sole live human in the area, and animals accompany you. A large black bird, a raven-stork hybrid, spreads its wings and lands in front of you. Two more join it, followed by wolves and jackals and dogs, forming a circle around you in which each whisper tender odes to your willingness to lie down on traces of decayed organs.
This place feels familiar to you, and while it would make sense to assume these animals could eat you, there’s a strong sense of protection. The animals grow human hands and remain in their formation around you while walking you further along the path, before telling you to descend once more and lay on your stomach. They peck and lick residue along your spine, and the confusion about what they want to show you becomes more clear: your solidarity with the hungry animals at peace with the arising and cessation of life’s appetites balances your bitter clutches to solitude in the human realm.
It’s less a moral lesson and more of a reminder that when frustrated with your human kin, your true brethren within the embrasure of carnality lies with the protective, guiding animals.
SAGITTARIUS
Sagittarius: A beautiful lover appears before you in a vision, in fact an amalgamation of your past loves, demanding to dance with you. You tend to have your eye on the next area of exploration, including people in your life, but the challenge here is to meet the synthesis of the unique energies of everyone you’ve loved (hint: this includes you!) and to harness this tantalizing mixture as the next step in your dance.
With a light touch on this amalgamation, aloneness poses no problem, for your lovers remain alive and present in your heart and memory as the ethers and vapors of your dancing body. As this potent mixture of lovers in beautiful human form appears to you, you dance into a kitchen full of eggs hatching baby chickens, and seeing the creative fruits of all your exploratory quests might seem a climactic pride-trap—but the beloved facing you insists that your focus remain on the dance as they take you deeper into a cave. You hear a resounding echo telling you that despite the fights and the bickering, you must not only attend to your self-satisfaction about how far you’ve traveled in the past, but remain attentive to the seemingly-stagnant heat of the current creative partners in front of you.
The message is that the supreme value lies not in the heat of what’s brand new, but in the reflective relating of energies of everyone you’ve loved from the past into the present. This reflective synthesis opens the gates to deepened creation, and even the road of boredom, bickering and confused dancing with self and partner bores the way into a different phase of your quest.
CAPRICORN
Capricorn: A new beginning in work and health, and of you diligently forming a rhythm toward the fruits of your labor, feels blocked by all the noise in the factory: the whistling smoke, the drones, and the yelling workers behind masks. Your colleagues, squarely built laborers, speak to you in deafening tones about the needs of not only your workplace, but work in general. They yell, “what is work to you?” You can’t tell if the deafening tones and the orange hues of the fire, screeching work instruments and smoke are irritants or sources of delight in tasks that have swept you up in their forceful speed.
You sometimes like force, other times like speed, but not always together. The fast rhythm delights you when it is comprehensible; the force delights you when it is yours to wield. In this case, power doesn’t feel entirely yours and the speed takes you into foreign territory that makes your brain and ears bleed. It’s a new initiation into relating with a more horizontal, less hierarchically satisfied form of power unfolding in a rhythm that constantly encircles your persistence and wants you to participate in it.
It’s not always important that you understand the work that you’re doing, but it is important that you revel in the irksome nonsense of the noise pollution around the construct that is work so that you can own both the problems and the virtues of your ambitious heritage and roll up your sleeves to bring the collective ethos of work into a new stage of evolution.
AQUARIUS
Aquarius: You find yourself in a desert, yearning for a party but with no friends around and no connection, when a giant bird takes you on its back and brings you to a mystery place. There’s an implicit understanding that it’s taking you to where your friends or siblings are in some paradisiac environment having a ball, but the exact inhabitants of the destination aren’t yet visible to you.
The bird drops you head-first into the chimney of a house in which a gathering takes place, and you listen to rollicking laughter, thinking it must be the sounds of the people you yearn to touch. They hear you cough, ask you to sing, and the sounds of your voice carry through not only that house but through the entire city.
After lonely, sooty singing for hours stuck halfway through the chimney, you land on the house floor, and it turns out they weren’t the ones you thought they were, but neither are you: in fact, none of you are who you were to each other or to yourselves. All that exists is the strength of your voice echoing through the streets as you sing the song of what it means to celebrate now, alone but together, intimate strangers. Everyone soon follows your lead, inverting themselves into chimneys and singing through all the dust in their throats.
You, Aquarius, are the one to teach us that in order to rejuvenate our social order and social lives, we must invert ourselves and understand that solitude and not knowing are the prerequisites for the song of friendship to truly move our species.
PISCES
Pisces: This New Moon finds you inside a swamp of memory gossip, like those nights when zombie-scrolling through old faces of people who inspired, loved, wounded and betrayed you seems the only option to pass the time or cope with the loneliness. You now have the opportunity to feel the edges in those memory lands between passive chatter and active participation, laughing with those voices, arguing with them and engaging in playful banter with the masks of lost life. The past becomes a carousel for you to ride before you realize that your horse isn’t stuck in the circle—it moves in concentric circles, out into territories where the masks of the old can re-emerge in a new way, confirming the nobility of your past pains and the good-willed nature of your journey.
An ogress-mother reaches out of that memory swamp, gossiping with the horses and masks that carry the momentum of that carousel of the past. She’s chortling over you, your resentments, and your should-haves. Most importantly, while whispering to those phantasms, she reveals where she hid the keys for you to discover that you’re not caught in that circle of memory alone. Since you, oh so perceptive, eavesdrop on this ogress-mother, you take two keys from inside the nostrils of the profile picture of the old elder who betrayed you, and ride your horse into a new moment that lets bitter memory coexist with freshly-bloomed flowers whose names you don’t yet know.
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