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: Urgent impulses on a rampage to deliver messages bring you into a knife fight this lunar eclipse. The daggers carry memos on them of aggressive words rooted in pent-up thoughts and feelings about your brothers. There’s a thought that through this swirling, spiraling motion of all the blades flying through the air, you’ll all reach a conclusion and cut open a new territory, revealed through your knife’s sharpness, into an emotional climax that paves the way for a new way of talking to each other.
The moon advises you to not second-guess yourself, but be aware: when messages inscribed on those shiny blades are poisonous, it’s important to remember that when you’re the thrower, the true poison lives in any words of malice embedded in those memos, and its toxicity will rub off first on your own psyche. You’re the lord of discovering what was previously undiscovered, and it’s worth considering that throwing mean words with the motion of your new creative instinct will contaminate the environment of the trails you are blazing. Instead, let the beauty of your urgency and the edge of competition cut through perceived limitations.
TAURUS
Taurus: You find yourself overlooking a pasture full of moldy old couches trapping cows who are only trying to settle into their habitat. In this scenario, you are both the voyeur-farmer looking out the window wanting to see greener pastures and the cows themselves trapped by discarded couches piled up on top of each other. One part of you relishes the vision of discarding your prized possessions; another part of you clings to them so tightly that it’s hard to move anywhere or nourish yourself, overcrowded by them. While a part of you wants to be in the here and now and another equally wants to visualize a grass-is-greener scenario, taking either of these routes requires being reminded of all your junk first.
Those sofas grow a fungus that rots their material. What was once a velvety luxury on your skin, tempting you toward repose, now calls for a reevaluation of the messages you’re sending yourself and your fellow cows about how you handle possessions. Is there a way to relate differently with the old material, and is there a way to relate differently with the freedom to imagine the new? When you realize that possessions exist to be the foundation and the adornment of your nourishment, rather than to bottleneck acts of self-care, you’re free to unbind yourself from the discarded furniture, relocating and repurposing it as what carried the memories that fed your soul in the past, as you yourself now breathe fresh air in an open field.
GEMINI
Gemini: This lunar eclipse you’re looking both ways crossing a highway with cars and buses zooming and crashing into each other in every direction. You’re trying to cross the street so you can assume your role as the spokesperson for a subject you hold dear to your identity in an awkward setting—the subject itself must be articulated in the middle of turbulent motion. The trouble is crossing the street seems impossible when all the vehicles are driven by extraterrestrials: the terrain, usually familiar on the terrestrial ground in a way even you take for granted, transforms its scope and the movement it can handle, when beings with foreign demands drive on top of it.
What are the ideas, bits of information and nanothoughts in your mind doing? There’s something you hold precious and seek the freedom to stand for & deliver, but your monkey mind is giving birth to a language that’s shifting moment by moment. When you assume the podium at the rest stop, and your audience of those poised to hear your enthusiastic opinions on your subject matter sit listening, weary from the journey, rest assured that the sound waves of all those drivers from another planet will only stain your expression of your freedom if you let it all be perceived as incomprehensible motion. What you’re up to, both within yourself and in your external world, is creating a sphere that accommodates the sturdy ground and the dizzying motion—the ground’s view of sturdiness itself transformed into an ability to be dizzy within your zealous pursuits.
CANCER
Cancer: Curled up into a ball on an isolated bed, sucking your thumb and rocking back and forth, there’s a part of you finding yourself torn about not saying the right thing. It may be your long lost sister, or fourth great grandmother, institutionalized with a single lightbulb hanging over their head, in pajamas and tears. Their/your life from the real outside world gathers into a saltwater bubble as you reckon with all its agonizing components—bitterness, perceived failures to protect, or perceived shortcomings in forging a nurturing nest—your most raw and vulnerable self gushing forth before you’re ready to walk on to land where you set up new homes.
In the midst of your anguish, a book carrying many stories appears to you: a folk pamphlet, or a holy book that had been buried under a grandparent’s bails of hay for hundreds of years. It contains balms for remorse and the pain inflicted by demons, antidotes you can easily apply in the spirit of brushing your teeth. The messages contained therein, both verbal and nonverbal, form a bridge between your past hurts and your sense of possibility: the most profound shelters may not be the ones you had built, or the alienating one in which you currently find yourself, but in the primal urges of your predecessors to pass their warmth on to you and in your unique interpretation of how you will rejuvenate their insulating barns and straw for your loved ones. Your grief and hope are held equally by the invisibles in their echoes of care.
LEO
Leo: A revolution happens, or at least a mirage of one, and this Lunar Eclipse you stand apart in a crowd proclaiming victory under a radical sun, all the members of your party dousing themselves in pure alcohol. There’s a surge of Dionysian frenzy to this expression of solidarity: it’s as if every member of the movement arrives at the same place, yearning for the limelight that’s limited to a pebble on a suburban ground. What at first appear as elbow rubs and intimate thuds of camaraderie turn out to be each person desperately wrestling to be the last one standing on that lone rock, each for themselves pushing & shoving with a voracious appetite for the status of the charismatic leader.
Where are you in this dynamic? In one moment, the supreme ruler; in the next, pushing to assert your place; in yet another, drunk on the pride this feeling of group belonging gives you. But you shake yourself awake: you’re not one who wants to “belong,” you long to lead and to gift others with the radiant expression of your unique creative voice. In the intoxication of the group, which wears the colors of tragedy, connecting you all with the oceanic swallowing of the individual, there is to be found, if you catch it, the source of that vital pulse of your own sovereign voice, felt as a roar surfing along the wave before any wipeout or blackout. The pushes for attention and the oblivion into the herd, for you, aren’t the point right now—it’s catching that hydrated uniqueness carefully among the dangers of an orgiastic tempest.
VIRGO
Virgo: Have you ever thought about your parents as another species? This Lunar Eclipse, a reckoning regarding your mother’s work in this human world arrives to you, as she walks off into a sunset. “My mother is a dinosaur,” echoes as a relevant reflection in the air as you recognize your roots and traditions as belonging to a type of organism utterly distinct from you. Or, perhaps, the roots from which you have grown into a full being feel fossilized to you, and you’re now ready to cast the imposing guardian-figure as a T-Rex, letting their habituated expressions of criticism and affection both walk into the distance never to return to you speaking the language you knew together.
It’s natural to feel dislocated, to feel that there’s a part of ourselves that’s anti human, or unhuman, and perhaps an even more everyday feeling is that the parents belong to a soul-tribe vastly different from what you’re here to do. Since you love to integrate and interweave patterns, Virgo, these thoughts sometimes feel unwelcome to you. But this is an opportunity to honor traditions passed down and the work you’ve done as a leader, public servant or parent in another way: eventually, what’s always comforted or tortured us, too, must learn a new language, which means it must first be released, walking off a cliff at sunset. It also means those who comforted and tortured you possessed origins outside of the way you, by necessity, perceived them at the time. Know that you are graced by a connection to a deep past whose form looks completely Other. Use that awareness to learn your own language of honoring and loving.
LIBRA
Libra: If you were to pinpoint and draw out the most vital sources of your expansion and purpose, you may intellectually acknowledge the terrifying, unpredictable creatures as playing a role, but letting them out to roam around is another matter. On this Lunar Eclipse there’s an animal that speaks many languages inside of a golden cage at an abandoned circus. You may have thought you were coming to observe many specimens from a distance, and in your carefully thought out ethical framework you may feel betrayed that the conventional circus parameters have abandoned you, left you alone with this grizzly ape. But the ‘it’ asks to be released from its cage, a sadistic prison that makes its polyglot self froth at the mouth, its gargantuan knowledge spewing forth in an incoherent spittle of foam. Much to your own surprise, you open the cage and leave the rest to the unknown.
Just what are these tongues spoken by that furry friend-foe? The many biological imprints within you each demand a voice, and while it’s tempting to merely think about this and observe from afar, there’s an instinct in your pounding heart that knows this One animal contains the key to the Many. Your attraction to unleashing it knows that out of this instinctual center flow the articulation of many idioms previously forgotten. The volition of your reason can partner with the situation here, thinking that the choice is its own, saying, “unleash the polyglot beast so that I, too, can have a pet fetish.” The inroads and whirling hoops between reason and unreason depend first on busting open those cages, however beautiful they may appear.
SCORPIO
Scorpio: Thrown onto the shore choking on storm-tossed water, you feel this Lunar Eclipse like you’re carrying two of you, and you can’t tell if you’ve just had dark sex that’s washed you up among all of that seaweed, or if it’s this other You on your back that’s made love to the fears within your own heart. What sorts of lovemaking make you feel elementally merged in one moment and drowning in the next? Alternating with the sense of yourself-as-submerged-lover is a keen ability to reflect on the experience, to discriminate between the myriad lovers and haters present in your life the moment you can breathe again. There’s a double you, a corpse and grinning skeleton, that seems to relish your heart in all of its want and terror. It talks of what has died, what is to die, and what has appeared as a phantasm of “debt.”
Anyone else would be running to mommy screaming when this double dead-alive soul agent becomes so starkly real, but that’s what this Lunar Eclipse is for in your case, Scorpio: to eye the fragments of your erotic and deadly experience for who and what they are. The key is not taking the gossip about your scandals, liaisons, betrayals and especially, debts, too literally or seriously. Though it’s wise to keep the discerning guard up, this skeleton has a sense of humor, and part of the whole joke lies in the fact that “debt” is only a lame cousin of death. Rather than owing anything, you ask these solicitors to identify themselves, and upon knowing them with clarified expectations, everything that each party genuinely entered the encounter for will be surrendered.
SAGITTARIUS
Sagittarius: At the marriage altar, you and your partner wear sunny smiles, and a murder of crows gathers above your heads. The news they deliver speaks not of evil, but of the ways you and your beloved are unshackling your own freedom from the serious white-hairs in the crowd gazing with sunken eyes at the ceremony. Those critical birds bring your awareness to a realm above the apparent soul concerns of both you and your beloved—whether that beloved takes the form of a partner, an inner love flame or an impassioned relationship with a field of inquiry. They direct you, through their chilling caws, toward your genuine orientation: the quest of the blazing light of the erotic seeker’s mind.
The throng of older folks looking on, the crows warn, may only appear to hold the keys to the knowledge of love and freedom that you seek. You find many of those sitting suits respectable in their ability to guard the gates of enlightened exploration covering a wide ground. What’s important today, in this passionate meditation on freedom and erotic union, is your awareness of the choice to point your gaze toward that promising orb above the arches even if—and especially because—there’s no ready-made language for that part of the quest. The old gatekeepers of tradition in the audience may talk to you about autonomy and partnered union, but what’s yours to articulate must be found looking not only at the way others have articulated the mysteries of self & other through the ages, but into the open sky of private soaring and utterly naked ‘two-as-one’.
CAPRICORN
Capricorn: Thermometers slide under the tongues of your brethren, taking the temperature of the inner urges to deliver the messages that demand communication. You isolate yourself in walls of junk food fixing your gaze on their nutrition facts labels, sitting on an airy bag of chips. In some moments you’re watching all the action from afar; in others, you’re right up close and checking everyone for fever. Every being around you wears labels of excess sodium, fat, or sugar, and all the chemicals drench the mop you splash on the floor. What is real and good, and how do you know? What is the bundle of real and good tasks worth pursuing and can you hang on to the units of information that are indications of this goodness as a secure foundation on which to perform your acts of service?
It seems important to you this Lunar Eclipse to quantify the toxicity or health of what’s around you and you’re torn between observing those evaluations from your prime minister’s seat, running around taking everyone’s temperature, and being the bedridden patient yourself. When in doubt, insulation and isolation seem to pave the way to the true service: the patient attention to your mind revealing itself to itself. Underneath the prejudicial labels of more of this, less of that, which already depends upon measurement instruments and standards of the past, you’re asked to take a trip back to the evaluative tools of the even deeper roots, which is inquiring how you can find inner silence and respite within all the panic, vulnerable physicality and cleanup. Your ability to go to ground zero and let your mind speak from the altar of silence will illuminate a genuine code for you to discern the integrity of your health, environment and its troublemaking potions.
AQUARIUS
Aquarius: You find yourself frantically flying toward all the usual mechanisms to emotionally withdraw, having fun and embracing humanity, only to re-find yourself kissing a snarling monster over flames. You thought it would all be the pleasant kind of fire, the one over which you possess some control, but in fact, you’re face to face with that growling boar showing you the full-fledged immersion into emotion. The speech of someone in the trenches of anger and vulnerability sounds different from the polite utterances of a professor of feelings making pronouncements from an ivory tower. Here, Aquarius, you’re sweating and delivering primal grunts, screams, cries, with urges to kiss, hump, and beg while you’re surrounded by flames.
It feels awkward because you had planned it to all carry on in the spirit of a festive celebration, and now everything is ablaze with fire and condemnatory lingo. But it’s a necessary passage for you to come down from the tower of space and burn yourself every now and then, charging fully into the heat of the passions that take you on an adventure away from your ability to fly high and stay above it all. What’s in it for you, in this case, is learning a new language of feeling consumed by those passions, and taking into your family of lovers not only what you consider ‘human’, but also what you consider vicious and bestial.
PISCES
Pisces: This lunar eclipse brings you the ultimate workout—the strife of lifting a heavy antique table with a circle of your ancestors sitting on top. You carry the weight of all the parental and multigenerational voices on your shoulders, hearing all of their warnings and comforting memories and cautionary tales above your ears, and wonder when you’ll be able to release your psychic strain and drop them. There’s a paradox at work here, Pisces: on one level, the ultimate weight falls upon you. On another level, you’re so adaptable and permeable right now that all appearances of a burden will dissolve instantly if you allow them to.
Moving from light to heavy is something you’re used to as a being with one foot in the trans personal, etheric worlds and the other in the ultra-materialistic world of form. This lunar eclipse asks you to merge the light, weightless world in your presentation of your glorious predecessors to it, with the dense ground, forest, rock, brick and ambition. Can you lift your lineage up to the sky on that heavy table while standing on one leg, feeling the breeze move over you, witnessing the whole process, knowing in your honoring of those who came before that all the warnings and curses too are stirred as nutrients into the soup cauldron between heaven and earth, boiling a warm & nourishing meal?
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