Currently in the Northern hemisphere, we are on the brink of spring. It’s a tender time of year in nature. New shoots are exposed to the occasional sharp nip of receding winter cold, yet also begin to thrive in the sun’s growing light and warmth. It’s a tentative time when the promise of new life is tangible but its appearance and full development uncertain.
New life within us is both promised and challenged in similar ways. Whether it is a creative project, a new relationship, or emerging new qualities that we’re evolving into, new life is fragile. Its emergence from the ocean of infinite possibility is not fully guaranteed. Just like waves in the ocean, new energy potentials may arise and fall back before they fully take form. This ever-changing state of possibility and dissolution is where we encounter the watery zodiac sign, Pisces. It represents the ocean of consciousness, from which all forms emerge, and where all forms, sooner or later, meet their demise. It’s the watery womb that gestates new life and the place where all experience and forms dissolves back to their pure pre-existent energetic state. As such Pisces is the place we fall apart and give over to life, in both healthy and less healthy ways – through surrender, forgiveness, flow, inspiration and imagination, soulful connection and bliss, and in apathy, addiction, or the victim state.
The New Moon in Pisces emerges at 1 Pisces at 07.06GMT on Monday 20 February. Its feeling-orientated energies are enhanced by a Grand Water Trine that includes the Moon’s South Node at 6 Scorpio and Pallas Athena (just stationed direct) at 10 Cancer. This energy combination highlights our feelings and intuition, subtly tuned into a broad spectrum of energies. We are awake to infinite possibilities flowing through our consciousness. Our response, reaction, or action from those possibilities is where free will comes into play. Its predominant player at this New Moon is Goddess of Love Venus.
Venus represents our creative Feminine potential and is close to Moon ruler Neptune (both also in Pisces) at the New Moon. She crosses the Equinox point into Aries less than an hour later. This suggests that some subtle impression, feeling or inspiration Venus collected from Neptune in her exact meeting with the mystic planet on 15 February, has been gestating in the subconscious or world of dreams and imagination between then and the New Moon, and can now begin to find its impetus. In other words, the subtle realms of intuitive resonance, numinous connection, or imaginative impulse begin to take more tangible form – like the first spring shoots appearing above ground. There is a karmic element of harvest to this emergence i.e. soul gifts and potentials that have been gestating a while, but they depend on mature emotional intelligence for the fullness of their new life. As with all possibilities, there is risk involved in engaging them, yet there is also profound learning. For without risk, do we ever dare to reach for our fullness?
The risk at this New Moon occurs in the imminent rapid movement of Venus across the equinox point. Anything moving here shifts from possibility to desire and drive, for Aries is the sign of direct action the Warrior archetype. Venus’s transition here predicates the Aries shadow of rushing, grabbing, or driving forcefully forward. Yet we are also at a point of active conception. Movement and action are called for yet with acknowledgment of the tenderness and fragility of new beginnings. The key lies in alignment with the Pisces core energies of flow, expansiveness, and soulful alignment, along with the ethos of service that can inspire each of us to reach for the stars.
Leo energies are also strengthening at this New Moon, as Black Moon Lilith in Leo approaches her square to the Moon’s Nodes in Taurus and Scorpio. This can indicate a spark of brilliance or magical synchronicity to what is emerging. Yet self-betrayal through self-doubt or fears of standing out, lack of passion or courage are all elements of Lilith in Leo, as is arrogance at the other extreme of shadow Leo. This indicates that a key element of the creative process now is to be active in the Taurus qualities of stability, nurture, patience and groundedness, that earthy Feminine qualities are calling, along with the soulful Feminine Pisces. Crone Feminine Hekate, stationing direct at 27 Gemini, a day before the New Moon, supports us in connecting the dots of exactly what is or isn’t required. As Crone, she is wise in the subtleties of when either ‘hands off’ or full engagement is needed, This comes from her ‘be awake and see’ rather than ‘wait and see’ approach, grown through her vast realms of experience.
Pisces is the sign of collective consciousness where individuality dissolves yet paradoxically it is also the watery womb of new life, from where each of us emerges anew. As we flow through Pisces towards Aries, the sign of spring’s fiery upthrust, we are called to move tenderly in tune with our most subtle feeling impulses.
