Welcome back to Only Connect, a New Moon column by artist and friend of the newsletter, moselle. Today: notes on our New Moon in Sagittarius, exact on Friday, December 19th at 8:43pm ET.
Fission Quest
The New Moon in Sagittarius lands this weekend with a question for scrying: what is “truth,” and how do we come to trust it? To close a year on oh so large and unforgiving a subject: truth, or that which we know by its interior ping. By a ringing of tones fixed within a thing, recognized if unseen, saying yes, X is correct; no, Y is not. Followed by, from theorized causalities to their physical consequences, determined with our bodies, at our external layers, in engagement, decision-making, across relations, speech… So asks this lunation: are such gestures of inscription, or truth’s livewire enactment, as yet necessary; how do we stay with desire, with what we call or would call ‘true’, at its cusp moment, in its state of pre-fission? How do we prepare for change in concealed form; how, in silence, do we express our sincerity?
These are all essential, basic Sagittarian themes, coming out to greet us with tenderness and somewhat shakily, amid peak confusion, in “weird times,” at this Gregorian cycle’s final draw. I am compelled by our New Moon precisely because of its fragility, its furtiveness; its suggestion of wisdom swallowed by a woolly, sunken void. Sagittarius is traditionally a sign of the bold and bountiful, its arrow of awareness pointed with questing confidence, open and honest and uninhibited. Here, however, we face a kind of charged delicacy, a quality of null foreboding apt for our moment of calendrical handover, both bracing from recent violences and as a drumbeat signal to forthcoming fissures, testing how much our culture can handle beneath a well-worn cover of progressive, linear time.
What the signal says, exactly, and warning us how, we are unsure, we dwell santoshically in darkness, reading by candlelight or at least attempting to, as our most vulnerable December selves, not quite free from fears, not without wants…hopes nursed and chastened from inside their heavy, heaven-seeking hoods. In Vedic astrology, the New Moon is situated in Mula’s asterism of bundled, huddled roots, of shadow work and spiritual dissolution, of a pause on Venusian representation (she now being gandanta, locked in a karmic knot) in favor of targeted rumination. Associations with south lunar node Ketu further an affect of detachment from material prospects — gift-giving compulsions suddenly rendered less important — and facilitate benevolently clarifying divides, bestowing (with some measure of disruption) a cleaving of voice from dramatics, from surround-sound noise. Sighs of release.
All this, just to carry us forward. To help us see a little more, even in stumbling over our plans, even whilst slurring our last words. To imagine and suspend those imaginings in hover-space, unarticulated. For the New Moon is squaring Neptune and Saturn at late Piscean degrees, and so, will naturally be frayed (not quite flooded) by deep waters, where projections swell, longings sink and suppositions tend to about-face. As swirling emotions keep you thinking you’re in chaos, a focus on truths left mute becomes liberatory: for what is intuited as real will not rest rushed, and the remainder, yes, can be enjoyed, relaxed into, still and secret and by law, only ever halfway understood.
Ritual
Low and slow root-chakra work (crawling; sacrum turned upwards): timer on for fifteen to twenty minutes, flop to the floor, lying face down, rest head on a palm-pillow, stomach over cushion, remember your own gravitational pull, sky above and earth below, ground holding you as more than mere illusion, you it will always receive, as much as you let it be so.
