Illustration from “Hansel and Gretel” by Kay Nielsen

November 19, 2021 // 27 Taurus

Through Taurus’s garden of earthy delights the Moon has been wandering for the past two days, grazing leisurely and fattening up. Closer and closer to its own node it comes, until, in the Friday early morning hours, it finds itself suddenly caught in the snare, suspended in the net under the winking, withering eye of the Medusa star, and in the crosshairs of the Scorpio Sun, while a hungry dragon tries to take a bite. Our lunation has taken a turn: we have entered the eclipse portal, and our garden has become a deep dark wood, where lives a cannibal witch in a house made of gingerbread and sweets, and the erstwhile-exalted Moon, our only light, is temporarily on the fritz.

With the Gemini north node leading us, like Hansel and Gretel, into the fairytale forest, we stumble toward our destiny, uncertain where we are going but staying together, and working together, at all costs. Venus in Capricorn judges from her lofty bench, ruling the transit and lending us backbone. The Feminine—whether exiled or empowered, celestial or chthonic—is omnipresent and on high alert. Under these auspices, some heads will roll, and others will prevail through steadiness and circumspection. Like our young heroes, let us keep our eyes open and our wits about us. Save your receipts, preserve your paper trail, and keep enough money in the bank, and pebbles in your pocket, to find your way back, should you find yourself waylaid. 

We are not out of the woods until after the solar eclipse on December 4, giving us some time to observe the stories that come up for us in the Taurus-Scorpio axis of our lives, and giving us a preview of next year’s eclipse menu, when the lunar nodes move into that pair of signs. Likely we are looking at the ways in which painful experiences inform the type of comfort and security we seek; how betrayal of trust can warp our sense of safety; how poverty takes a toll on the psyche and on the ancestry; and how we may have once lost ourselves, and found ourselves again. And, we might also include internalized patriarchy, atrocity in the face of famine, rites of passage, loss of innocence, the Unmothered Mother, and the resiliency of children, if we take this fairy tale Full Moon eclipse as a taste of themes to come. Hand-in-hand, sisters and brothers, we will go through it all together.