Nate Speare is an astrologer, vocal artist, storyteller, mythologist, and educator. He comes from a line of astrologers and sound/music composers who used natural environmental sounds and the connection between sound, the natural environment, and the characters within the earth and sky. He offers consulting sessions, writes essays, tells stories and uses his voice in videos and live performance as an active representative of the world to re-ignite a sense of magic in every client. It is his aim to connect each person to the idea that they are not blank slates, but that they entered the world with their own "daimon" and irreplaceable style of talented genius with inspiring and definite directions in life.
As an astrologer, Nate has studied under Jungian psychological and evolutionary astrologer Montgomery Taylor, and is influenced by Archetypal, Shamanic and Renaissance schools of astrology. Nate directs Mythopoetic Astrology, a consulting practice that integrates experiential therapy of astrology through Astro-Drama, voice, sonic art and client consulting. His teaching credits include Salem Summer Symposium (Massachusetts) Myth and Theatre Festival (France), and Jung Institute NYC. Nate is a collaborator of PanTheatre, the France-based cultural organization that researches the relationship between contemporary performance, mythology, and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman, the company's Honorary President.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, where he is also the co-artistic director of Nekyia Theatre.
November 26th- An oily ground populated with smoldering soldiers and lovers brings to our awareness the passions trying to unblock themselves. Secret agents scan and sniff; those amorous fighters breathe deep, ready to go to battle with their limitations. A cavern opens to the rogue exploration of secret longings leading to low-rumbling invasions of boundaries. We probe, pry and pivot, all in the name of moving past the barriers of outmoded convention and knee-jerk dread.
Behind the battlefield, a live scarecrow stands tall in the woods, and bats come and go, feasting upon his flesh. We are the surge of animality in those bats and the scarecrow itself, too, guarding what’s necessary to preserve in order for our limits to be transcended, offering our eyes for dinner, scrapping the old way of seeing. The bats remind us how the human must give its talent to the animal world and not hoard it. This includes honoring and offering, in a spirit of creative surrender, to the passions of the animal realms uninterested in human convenience: anger, lust, regression, terrified nighttime, irrepressible need. Our expansive offerings make us guardians of the feast, at peace with the inherent unrest that gives existence its pulse.
November 25th- Divine wrath rushes in, creating tension and release within our contorted human forms. Sores from lip-biting, aches and agonies of the chest, growls of boundary-asserting, territorial rage, fill and empty large circles into which we leap. Our implosive and explosive twists of limb are seen from the go-getters above who, unattached to their own faces, jump out of airplanes and charge their heads through high-story glass windows.
There’s little desire to leave the ground altogether, but there’s a satellite push toward flight. Digging a circle in the earth, a host of fireflies greets us, entering our being through the throat. In the buzzes and tingles and surges of firelight, the impulse to spiral up among the stars crafts itself within us, enacting our values from another view, the anger but the seed of this inner action. The ground is nice to walk and sit on, but it can be great to leave it every now and then, too. Whoosh!
November 24th- An intersection of desert expanse and urban gossip creates shades of impulsive adventure. Moral philosophers on one side, drunk and resigned seeing stars in a bar, escape into neon lights surrendering to the indulgence of the daredevil desires of adolescence. “Tumble down the steepest staircase, railing, mountain trail,” the voices seem to say. “Bruise and break yourself for the rush of the battle scars.” Shock value makes the hormones feel true to their discoveries. On the other side of that desire-factory, a stampede ravages dry land after sundown.
When looking out from those strobes and dance lights, up from the numbing glasses, it’s possible to sit out with the warthogs perching on the stone wall and snorting, chuckling at the procession of obsessive wants. Impulses insist on running altogether; the antelopes and rhinos possessed, and the frustrated teens and jackasses, too, breathless, groping for climaxes. Rolling over in laughter, our pig-selves make it clear that to follow those yearnings we must preserve their integrity, which is about witnessing: “look and observe as all of the desires feel how it feels to charge forward. And don’t take it all so seriously!” the warthogs chortle, bellies up to meet the underbelly’s belch of the morning sun.
-expanding our ability to dissolve the appeal of an illusion by holding all of our ‘selves’ in a warm embrace
-building the necessary medicine to heal any shock of discovering what no longer has a place in our lives
-building the necessary imagination through which the discovery of new values or desires can turn into living realities
-building the tolerance and diversity of perspectives necessary for daily living in society to coexist with the deep, irrational, uncompromising needs of the unconscious
-building the faith that behind primal fears of nonexistence lies another existence of something that hasn’t yet been discovered
-expanding our imaginative responses to our dark moods and secret selves
-expanding our mental agility to see our journey from different vantage points and compassionately acknowledge how far we’ve come
-expanding our ability to ground the imagination of how our values have been rejuvenated, situating our *applied imagination* between the higher conscious upper world and the dark instinctual underworld
*Waxing moons, every month, are about building and expanding certain priorities. The current waxing moon cycle represents the growth of what was planted during last weekend’s new moon in scorpio. Themes of regeneration, death and resurrection, primal desires and instinctual forces seed the quality of what we are building & expanding upon from now until next weekend.
November 22nd has us caught between the anticipation of an oncoming deluge and a stagnant marsh. The distant foreboding rumbles of the flood merge with the psychedelically colored water in the quiet swamp. Vapors of addiction, a foggy search for counterparts who inspire possibility and bad medicine form spilled-milk-shaped nixies down there in the substratum.
An owl overlooking our dissolution of self points the way toward an underneath, where we crawl alongside the slugs and worms in the trenches. Deep under the roots, there’s a silent room smelling of damp cellar. In its quiet isolation seeming at first unbearable, we hug our ears to the dirt wall, hearing choirs cheering on our convergence of the underground and upper ground. Dirt sighs & surrenders; light of a sunkissed mountaintop shines into the cave, kissing our faces—today, alone yet guided to light, a most precious meaning of “after dark.”
November 19th- Shells break open containing the juicy, heartbreaking thrills of union inside. In a vast farm there’s a crop of laughter-bearing fruits kept secret for fear of what their taste might open up. The somber gatekeepers stand guard of the harvest with hoe, axe, shovel, sensing that we as the animals who yield the growth of this joyfruit perch at the ready to fly away unbound. Blissful meetings and dripping nectar freeze, dry up through the gaze of “need” and “should.”
That is, until perception of the agricultural field opens and the fruits before our eyes become stars dancing merrily in overlapping circles. With voice and a mirroring action that makes us bounce back looking at our molecular structure, we’re reminded of our own starry origins. The perception of a star’s boundaries is itself a product of a limited way of seeing that ignores star matter’s inseparability from our own being. No need to spoil the soul’s pulse toward its curiosity with hardened questions rooted in convention! Sudden recognition of our true nature makes us careen forward, backward, sideways; the erotic coconuts explode onto our masters.
November 18th- Heart’s blood and fossils go hand in hand, as threats of extinction pervade our minds. We’re of three essences today: warriors eager to expand into new territory, stern elders counseling the rash heroes on jagged rocks, and darkened T-Rex skeletons. The day is both a warning and an echo of celebrated species through time showing us a trail of where our impulses might lead. The thought of becoming dinosaurs feels severe, but the deeper meaning of ‘the fossil’ comes to us, rescued from the feelings of lack, limitation and doubt into an emblem of trail-marking integrity.
The dinosaurs lie down—in fact, ourselves from deep in the past and in a parallel time—and lay out a trail of fossils each etched with molds of human hearts. “Your vitality and love flow through this shape,” we hear a voice whisper. There’s a pulsating warmth sustained by the engraved hearts in this trail. And when we feel it, our red joints, chapped lips and heavy doubts are miraculously lifted by a counter-support within the gravestones, births and dreams of all the people and places we’ve ever loved and thought we’ve lost.
November 17th, sadistic collisions of foundation and rebellion form a thirst for climax and resolution within ourselves. As spies have served, undercover, both slimy authorities with sunken eyes and renegades racing toward our cells as fast as they can in the traffic jam, we’re sitting ready, sweaty, on the edge. One part of us embraces the transgressive pulse when those liberators promise to bust open the doors and rejuvenate us. Another part of us insists on staying put, arguing that we’ve finally adapted to our limitations. Holy lanterns light our prisons and we’re possessed by self-flagellation; an invisible taskmaster hungry for bruises rips through those walls.
But a loving bug’s hug brings another possibility to our day, or perhaps our night. Outside the complex there’s a giant dragonfly with warm wings. Hundreds of humans wait in line to hug this fly, marking the rite of passage of their own flight into the universe. When this fatherly insect turns out to be the one sneaking into the jail cell, in its warm embrace we can feel a more true, enduring kind of foundation—not brittle, oppressive frames, but warm nourishment toward renewed flight. While in one sense, our gashes mark the ways in which we’ve rolled through confinement toward the discovery of proper shelter, and in a way we still live this limitation, one gesture of love melts frigid tyranny away, opening the soul to a mountain air of becoming on the other side.
November 16th- there’s a glimpse of moving into greater expanse, our knowledge and optimism populating forests in a way that creates a choir of onlookers cheering us on in our urban and pastoral marathons. But that’s the awareness of possibility which exists for an instant only to be interrupted by teachers sternly brushing all the electrifying, life-shaking, revolutionary knowledge under the grass. The authorities seem to bury and ban what gives us life, drugging us out, numbing our faculties in the meantime, so that our light of optimistic purpose is suspended in an indecisive haze of misty moodiness. This is where we are: with conviction that all the firelight of joy exists, but caught in cerebral overexposure to options and the ache of separation from the ultimate.
When a grandpa toad emerges, calling us down from our one-room schoolhouse to a lake with tall grass after a raven sweeps the sky and turns the bustle of our studies into empty night, we sense a sudden power within listening to uncover the forbidden zones under muddy weeds. The toad croaks and sings in an ancient tongue, sacred scripture and drunken nonsense, inviting us to join in. Our hollers reach the stars, and tentacles of vitality pierce the sky, opening it up for light’s nourishment. All that’s needed for renewal is to first listen, and then speak the roaring language that makes the fire come to life in our chests again.
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
Albrecht Dürer, “The Pelican in her Piety”
Aries: This new moon, for you, is like the timeless tale of the phoenix growing hundreds of years old, wearying of singing its glorious song to the sun and then burning to ash. The act of the phoenix putrefying, making room for the birth of a younger, fresh self, is akin to this moon for you, Aries—more precisely, the moment between burning to ash and then rising anew, still somewhat in that shady dream state, trudging through muddy garbage bags stuffed with moldy tax documents. Glimpsing the sun for the first time in a whole death march cycle, you scream a bloodcurdling victory cry: Now it’s time for LIFE again! Feeling the shift to the rhythms of the living as opposed to the burned, you take some awkward minutes to adjust, marching around either killing everything or humping everyone.
Not so fast. Know that your pulse right now, and this urgent uprising, is a natural response to the clouds parting to show you a direct pathway toward the sun from your deep roots. But this doesn’t negate everything you’ve just experienced. Leaning into the chthonic feelings of lurking through all the old baggage, the slow decay that’s not your jam, was a powerful learning experience for you. Taking time to thank the adventure of burning to ash, even still replaying it for moments in your mind, helps you pave the way for marking new intentions in merging with life and loved ones. And then, yes, holler, holler, scream and conquer away.
TAURUS
Albrecht Dürer, Peasant Couple Dancing
Taurus: Many shapes and silhouettes of partners, close friends and enemies spins around your cozy corner, and you become aware of all the barbs and shadows of those who stir strong emotional reactions within you. Taurus, you become a softie with those you love, and this new moon is a rebirth of how you experience the dyad in both its life-giving and life-taking ways. Your spouse becomes your doctor who becomes your best friend who becomes your surgeon who becomes your enemy, in a pandemonium; a hall of mirrors of relating from the heart’s blood until you and your one other collapse together in the wind with your hearts overflowing.
This new moon shows you that it’s not all about having your way all the time, and it’s also not all about pleasing the other person. It’s about being able to fall and rise through the integrity of passion itself, which is a sacred, shared feeling. The mental stings you feel right now are creating an opening for greater intimacy through their act of cutting through your blinders and fixations about the beloved, and they’re also bringing what’s important to you into focus by inflaming your devotion to contemplating the other.
GEMINI
Albrecht Dürer
Gemini: A lineup of old regurgitated nutrients presents itself to you as a result of latent food intolerances that have manifested in your body. The food asks to be discarded but your relationship to diet whispers the request for rejuvenated self-feeding. Staring at your own vomit, and at echoes of what no longer works in the way of feeding yourself, is not pleasant. But it’s that kind of reflection on the putrefied junk, that’s needed right now, Gemini.
This new moon asks you to be as a hellhound with hearts in its eyes, who has softened in its guarding the wrathful gates of your mind-body because it’s discovered new nutrients of hopes and dreams to feed it. And, having discovered the goodies, it joyfully carries many sacks of trash and scraps of allergens behind its tail, knowing that your explorations of toxicity will feed some other being who needs it, and it’s all thanks to your experimentation. Embracing the gap, and thanking the hopes, dreams and morsels that you discovered are no longer tolerable, carrying them out to the grand world compost, makes way for new beginnings in what you digest, both in food and in ideas.
CANCER
Albrecht Dürer, “Satyr Family”
Cancer: Attraction and repulsion; the glamorous thrill of the fulfillment of new kinks that are psychologically complex and that give birth to even more complicated dynamics between you and what you love—these hot temptations of ‘for’ and ‘against’ characterize this new moon for you. In a dungeon full of leather you take on new loves, reveling in your lovers’ emotional attachments to you. Music swells and so does joy and it all seems like fun, when suddenly you all turn into slimy, black snakes, slithering and birthing pale serpentine monsters out of your mouths. Egg production spirals out of control and creations move faster than you can handle, growing at a rate that outpaces you as you run for your life.
This new moon is showing you the power of your conception on both sides—on the joyous, life-giving, playful and magical side of your powers, and also the part of you that shrinks away or even retaliates in disgust toward your creation. Remember Hera throwing Hephaestus off of Olympus because she hated his physical appearance? Whatever creations you’ve rejected may have done some good for the world while you weren’t watching, and those creation-magnets after whom you’re lusting may set in motion more than you can initially handle. As long as you’re aware of this dynamic, you’re ready to hold the tension that characterizes your unique conception-sorcery on this new moon.
LEO
Albrecht Dürer
Leo: When you find yourself in a dark swamp, roots from underneath and from the past overwhelm your sense of ground. There’s a reaching-out, a cry into the halls, chambers and underground tunnels of the past, and a song coming back from them to you. Ghosts of your mother and grandmother, and fourth great grandfather, lurk there, too—all the dead relatives are sitting on toilets crying “ouch!” after being stung by wasps. When you look more closely, you see that these toilet seats are really thrones, and that if you peer closely enough into each root that’s grabbing your butt like tentacles, seemingly trying to pull you back into your past, they’re actually showing you many seats of sovereignty: the many manifestations of the one throne that is the supreme embodiment of your creativity.
Now is your chance to go into those tangled, dirty memories, meeting your scream with the screams of old loved ones you may have forgotten, and seeing in the cobwebbed thrones–now microscopic within those roots, but soon to glow and grow through your awareness and vision—a many splendid fruition of your powers to passionately express yourself. It may seem at first that you’re mired in the past, but in fact, those memories that try to pull you in and make you lose your identity are regenerative if you can see all the seats and signposts of your soul’s reach into deep time (and timelessness) for its source of meaning, birth and creation.
VIRGO
Albrecht Dürer
Virgo: Motion and messages are frantic around the neighborhood with ominous rainclouds, incoherent babbling, yells and whispers. Postcards and letters soaked in oil come to your doorstep and you find yourself either receiving curdled news or being its bearer. People aren’t shooting the messenger, but you find yourself running from station to station with your feet on hot coals. There’s a message to purge, and even if it’s unwelcome, the need to spit it out transcends any pain—there’s simply no room to sit still in the agony.
If today contains any trap, it lies in messages of “should.” The reportage of grief feels dark, but nobody needs to tell anyone to handle it differently. Though helpful counsel is one of your strengths in times of need, Virgo, certain times call for feeling the sting of the news and then the silence through which the many repercussions of a message can be felt among your brothers and sisters. Hearing the tempestuous gossip from you motivates your neighbors to face their darkness and appreciate their loved ones as brethren, and the same happens for you. Notes that sting can also rejuvenate when feeling both the silence around them and the love that underlies the hurt these messages carry.
LIBRA
Albrecht Dürer
Libra: Possessions and decorations sparkle with you and other shady figures perched in front of them. Vain collectors gather around your most treasured objects, peering at you through old style portraits. You can’t tell if these are ghosts trying to steal your sense of worth away from you, or if you’re seeing reflections of your own territoriality. The whole mansion appears exquisite, but there’s a foul stench in the master bedroom, and it becomes clear that these collectors within your inner world have hid many dead enemies in the closets.
The hardest part for you on this new moon, Libra, is not knowing what’s yours and what belongs to another, even if you feel the pinch of possessiveness so strongly. Becoming the guarded curator is not a role with which you long to identify yourself, but it’s one which the people of your psyche might fuse together to keep your feelings of self-worth and desire close, focused, real to you. The challenge is to be alright with giving all of these treasures over, feeding the dead people in the portraits looking back at you, knowing that the flowers and fruit are fake, and knowing that this pandemonium of prissy estate-holders looking down their noses at you are fragments of you. These figures comically mirror back to you the process of your own sense of worthiness being rejuvenated: real flowers, a true garden, and the ripest of fruits are coming your way soon.
SCORPIO
Albrecht Dürer, “Portrait of Mother”
Scorpio: If anyone’s growing a new body during this new moon, it’s you. At first it feels like a knob that continues to swell and turns into a full-blown other double body before you even know it or can come to your senses. Your hair is wet from amniotic fluid of birthing this new you, at first lonesome and screaming into a wooden void. Why won’t others hear you and see this feral, uncompromising, creatively chaotic emanation of your soul now revealing itself? You’re by turns empowered and tortured by the freshness of perspective finding its way to you.
One thing’s for sure: this is your time. The reason it’s painful is because you love to do the most powerful transformations behind the scenes, but now you’re necessarily front and center, even though twisted into a gargoyle shape. The dripping hair, ferocious voice and demands that others listen will serve you in the long run in the strength of your announcement of this fearless, bold way of seeing your world. And if your house happens to be too small for you, crumbling in the presence of this animal body, let your containers of self and relationship turn to dust so that stronger vessels come into your life, matching your newfound ferocity, supporting you and your loved ones. “What’s chaotic is also what’s definite!” could be your motto for this new moon. Embrace a new adventure, a total regeneration of body, and let the most primal passions roar into the wood and wind.
SAGITTARIUS
Albrecht Dürer
Sagittarius: Confined in a prison cell, you yank on the bars and pound on the walls almost painting the whole place with your bloody knuckles. Confinement is not your way of operating, and you writhe and contort yourself, questioning desperately why you chose the adventure of claustrophobic vulnerability during this new moon. What is there to learn about “no escape” situations? How can the solid borders of a cell find resonance with the boundaries of a mountain, a path, a stream you might walk along under other circumstances? Such whimsical musings don’t feel funny to you; you’re too busy banging on concrete from all sides and traumatizing your usually bright spirit.
Part of the key is realizing that with exploration comes choice, and you chose this precise adventure of the vulnerability within circumstances that force you to feel the shrink. Within apparent limits, there may be another type of expansion that occurs, even if you’re not immediately able to see it. Though at times you see the world as boundary-less, there may be some merit in seeing boundaries between here and there, between prison cell and meditation cushion on retreat, as mere flickering lights. In that perceptual situation, you alone are the one with the choice to turn the switch on or off, and to choose the way you see your environment. It’s possible to switch from light to dark, and from fleshy to subtle, in viewing your seeming imprisonment from a different light, illuminating the mind and its non-solid borders, revealing to yourself a birth of expanse within at first panic-inducing situations wearing the face of oppression.
CAPRICORN
Albrecht Dürer
Capricorn: Your life may appear today as a museum full of casketed friends, with your hopes and dreams feeling just as cold-shouldered and cut off from living as the ideas of your larger circle. As the curator of this museum and also the friends themselves, and the ideas they represent, you possess agency over how this hall of ideals builds upon itself or becomes demolished. Having control enhances your serenity, but the frozenness the feeling of ideals withdrawn from the pulse of your day-to-day action plan leaves you wanting a more human grasp on your foundation.
Luckily, this is the new moon for transmuting whatever aloof, chilly feelings exist within your social circle and within the way you’ve articulated your life aspirations to yourself. It’s the time to acknowledge what’s already ripened and then faded into the past; a chance for you to own your elderly, discerning gaze upon all of the expressed wishes around you. It’s okay if at first the whole museum needs to collapse, but the memories of integrity your companions have given you along the way, and the tremors of thought that animate your inner architecture must stay with you, even if the old expression of everything else goes into fossil form.
AQUARIUS
Albrecht Dürer
Aquarius: You’re asked to communicate the scandalous secrets of a once-prestigious institution in your life. It seems that invisible people all around you expect you, in your ‘cool as a cucumber’ bearing, to calmly rip all the skeletons of the patriarchs out of the closets of the church-tower, becoming an idealistic mad scientist confessional sexton. You didn’t ask for this job cleaning house, one that makes so big a mark on a sacred establishment that you’re not exactly sure how to integrate your ideals with the filthiness of what’s been revealed; how to replace the stench of deception inside the holy chamber.
If anyone’s up to the job it’s you. There’s no need to shock your loved ones with the secrets, or with the literal or emotional decayed bodies of your forefathers spilling out their imperfections and inconsistencies. Chances are your own mental state is not entirely clear to you, so it’s best to tread with caution in finding immediate replacements for the morbid buildup. But it’s possible, within your means, to talk to the living and to those who have passed on, with a compassionate ear attuned to the wishes of both those who are alive and those who came before. You’re a champion of inconsistency, and your job now is to show the world that the Eccentric, when it’s allowed to vitalize stale institutionalism even through the ways that it has stained those same fixtures of social life, rejuvenates the body of communities that had been plagued by fixed ideas of how to do it all right.
PISCES
Albrecht Dürer
Pisces: The sense of separation and longing is too real, and when contemplating the journey the length feels even longer, but you’ve grown new wings. Following the wind to your destination that comes from the longing that’s arisen out of the compost of old values, your body and soul are vulnerable, plagued with tears, achy and agitated. Part of the urgency to go is that just as you’re pursuing, you’re also pursued. Birds with an appetite fly after you. Narcotics and prescription medicine almost render you a numb aviator, but even if you can’t feel your limbs, you continue.
There’s something in the journey itself, Pisces, that characterizes the current process of shedding an old character trait or skin. You’re the one to feel both the separation from and union with your divinity, and in this case the gap between you and the sublime feels too exaggerated, so intense and painful as to be unbelievable. The initiation and challenge to soar, numb as after surgery, over the void to a reunion with your reservoir of passionate feeling, makes you unconditionally a hero. Though inside you may be limping, numb, not feeling your parts, as a signature on the world you now fly with the grace of an eagle, making the trip so that all of our hearts’ blood can pump once again, showing yourself and everyone around you that it’s all possible.
mythopoeticastrology.com 