Only Connect: Old Skin, New Ceremony

New Moon in Virgo ~ Redux

Only Connect: Old Skin, New Ceremony

From Robert Altman’s Pret-a-Porter, 1994

The New Moon on Sunday, September 21st falls at the 29th degree of Virgo as a rare re-telling: doubling back on a Virgo “Black Moon” that opened our eclipse portal in August and facilitating a partial solar eclipse, in alignment with the Lunar Nodes, and particularly the karmic South Node. This follows on from a very powerful lunar eclipse in Pisces during the full moon earlier this month.

I want to begin our discussion of it backwards from how this usually goes, by starting with a ritual, a quick remedial interlude:

The tinny, frenzied feeling of recent weeks, with their jittery hypersensitivity portending (and delivering) so much random violence and hopefully, elsewhere, kindness; symptoms of phone addiction, mass distraction mechanisms seeming to mount in anticipation of further changes, feedback, a watershed...How do we break rapport with such reactivity?

Drown it out with sound, ideally terrifying, transporting sound. Now is a very good time to listen to loud, sonorous chanting; music of the on-high — the atemporally inviolable — that with compassionate sobriety cuts through, and ferries us from, an anxious, all too lockjawed atmosphere below. Best if it corresponds, somehow, to your birth or adoptive culture, see this, or this, or even this example.

What comes up collectively is a testiness, and with it, a call to slow things down.

Such tonal resetting helps us gather focus after the burnishing of the Virgoan scythe. Some of us may still be experiencing its physical energizing, its speech and belief-level clearing-out, or perhaps even its brand of frantic, cloud-busted compulsion. Others may be completely done in, slack to the ground with creative exhaustion. Regardless, there is some measure here of self-consciousness (this is also Venus and Uranus interacting), a buzzy foreboding specifically around our external representations: how we define our personal being among concatenations of people and values, flotsam of past and future narratives rising to the surface of our habitual encounters. There’s an aura of excited trepidation, when everyone is a little afraid of each other, or afraid of what might happen if we get, conversationally, too close; in a Nico moment of beautiful and alone, as if needing to — courageously — remember and re-remember how we are all already woven and one.

What I am describing here is a general shadow aspect, observable in my periphery, relating to questions of alliances, affinities; who we want to be around, what we belong to. Vedic astrology locates this lunation in Uttara Phalguni, a hammock-shaped sign unfolding between Virgo and Leo, which deals with contracts, agreements, partnerships. World-stage wise, as well: over the weekend, the sky will form a kite-like structure (explained here); the eclipse is not visible over the US, yet will perhaps affect the status of the dollar, the Federal Reserve, the Euro, various governing bodies…Other dimensions of the transit will be more specific to your nature, your tasks; what comes up collectively is a testiness, and with it, a call to slow things down. The New Moon’s impartings are both fresh, heading into an invigorated autumn and simultaneously, bear a familiarly tunneling depth, situated along a Piscean axis with which 2025 began, where Neptune and Saturn are currently drawing us coolly towards an edge. The edge of what?

Of our own outlines, I suppose. Of a full range of human evolutionary possibilities. That is Virgo’s nervine scope, its delicately calibrated circuitry. We have now spanned the sign’s duration, traveling from zero point to final degree. In this life-imaginary, there is chaos, drama, ambition and then there is our sense of needing to respond to it, to resolve something, and what if we didn’t do either, what if we threw our arms up and said no dice. Except to insist, shards of brutality are harbingers of grace. Do you like what you are seeing around you? Do you even know or understand what it is? There are many efforts being made to parse our “strange interregnum” (so powers this very platform!), and still fewer interventions within it. It’s been a half-decade of hands waving not yet, not yet, though almost…The condition expressed here, at this last juncture, is of wanting to meet and to mitigate an event, and instead, as ever, meeting ourselves. A next self, hopefully, for a next era, its blessings already received and asking to be bravely, publicly, borne.

Only Connect is a New Moon column by artist and friend of the newsletter, moselle. Its name cites the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910):

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.