The Magical Metamorphosis of the Christmas Full Moon

Friday's Full Moon takes place on the early hours of Christmas Day, and if it is a gift, and it is, this one comes with the mandate to use it wisely. The outer planets are again very much involved, along with the personal planets of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, all in aspect to each other, and to Neptune, Uranus, and Eris, in this powerful and portentous end-of-year configuration. This Full Moon therefore continues the series of intense lunations that we have been seeing lately. Mercury is exactly square to the new planet, Eris, with Mars opposed, while Venus and Jupiter form a Yod with Eris as the focal point. Eris remains quite close to a stationing Uranus, strengthening further this trickster archetype of the surprising event and the unexpected epiphany. Eris and Uranus come into perfect conjunction, for the first of several exact hits, early in this next summer, signifying a peak of inventiveness and distrust of the established status quo. The Uranus-Pluto square is getting stronger in its symbolic support of major evolutionary change, coming to within two degrees of exact as we head into the turning of the year. Saturn square Neptune, though easing off, is still very much active as well, through to the end of the coming year, with one peak of its intensity being reached during June and September of 2016. This contrast and combination of down-to-earth and fanciful archetypes implies deceptive illusions running aground on the difficulties of hard and fast reality, as well as concretizing and making manifest our highest ideals for ourselves, and for the planet, going forward.

That Uranus and Pluto are once more getting stronger in their radical combination implies that our changes are only just beginning to ignite, and to impress themselves upon our awareness. This storied 'world transit' representing thoroughgoing transformation, the hallmark of our turbulent decade, heralds the revolutionary ardor of our inheritance from the sixties, an underground stream that is now re-emerging. With Mercury so involved in these current skies our consciousness regarding our dysfunctional cultural situation is rapidly rising. We, each one of us, know the changes that we are being enjoined to make in our lives, and for the sake of the life of the community around us, and have only to find the courage and the will to act upon our truest convictions.

With all this concentration of planetary energies within this current configuration aimed at Eris, identified through the course of several years of research, since its discovery in 2006, as quite powerful in charts, we might be beginning to find within us the spiritual mandate to act; with this impulse getting stronger in this final week of the old year. I have been able to characterize Eris as a spiritual warrior for soul intention, with plenty of evidence for this from the charts of paradigm shifters and major feminist voices all through recent history, thus raising the idea of individual action in search of global change. Obviously, perhaps, this is an activity that is now more than ever sorely needed, as we navigate the truly remarkable energies encircling our terrestrial globe at this important cosmic moment in time.

The Sabian Symbols for the Sun and Moon in this powerful Full Moon also speak to us, in this interesting holiday patterning. They are, for the Moon, in the fourth degree of Cancer, "A cat arguing with a mouse," or metaphorically with another part of itself, which we can relate to our own stories of how the things that we chase can take on a different meaning once we have caught up with them. Marc Edmund Jones has this to say: "a symbol of [humankind's] necessary establishment of a set in mind ... as preliminary to any entrance into [meaningful] personal experience." Indeed we are perhaps learning through the challenges of these fraught times that perspective is everything. No matter how hard things might seem, you win when you are able to embrace the struggle that has ultimate meaning for you.

For the Sun, opposed, in Capricorn, we find, "A party entering a large canoe," and this symbol reminds us that whatever we do, or how we do it, our decision has consequences that reverberate far beyond our individual lives, to the continuity of the collective. Dane Rudhyar, who knew and worked with Jones, comments on "a common enterprise which may be the answer to a need [and] a common will ... a focus in concrete action." By relating this to a journey by water, representing deeply held emotional truth, he conjures up the polarity point of this degree across the zodiac in deeply-feeling Cancer, as currently occupied by the Moon. This symbol therefore reminds us that any one person's private desire to find the best within themselves becomes translated into far-reaching action serving the good of the entire surrounding collective. You must never despair of being relevant. Whatever you sincerely aspire to do, to make a difference, now is the time to go for it. The consequences — for yourself and your world — are enormous.