Eclipse - Full Moon in Taurus -11/19/21-
Like most children of the 90s, I grew up watching The Nightmare Before Christmas. A lot. In fact, I loved it so much, I had my copy in the fancy plastic case that would snap close, not the chintzy cardboard sleeve which half the time would send VHS tapes tumbling out of the bottom when you pulled the video off the rack. But what’s not to love? Set in a town of perpetual Halloween, populated by a diverse community of monsters and ghouls for whom the terrifying, grotesque and profane represent virtues of the highest order, they are led by their disenchanted King on an ill-fated quest to resolve his existential crisis.
It is at this point I should probably warn readers that this article will contain spoilers. But in all fairness, if you haven’t yet seen this movie, which is currently having its first Saturn return, that’s kind of on you.
Mars, as it transits through Scorpio, reminds me a lot of Jack Skelington. Mars is very powerful, and very much at home in the sign of Scorpio, like a Pumpkin King in his very own Halloween town. Mars is after all, the Lord of screams, of fear and of death - among other things. And like Jack Skelington, Mars will pursue a goal relentlessly and with little regard for consequences once he has set his sights on something he wants. It’s not like Mars is necessarily trying to hurt anyone - not most of the time anyway. Other people just aren’t really part of the equation, unless they have some a role to play in his personal agenda. But as Mars slices shark-like through Scorpio, he must contend with Saturn in Aquarius, bogging him down every step of the way.
Saturn in Aquarius is, if nothing else, an ideogram for dissatisfaction with the status-quo. As we approach this first eclipse on the Scorpio-Taurus axis, Mars and Saturn are locked in a contentious square, exacerbated by the fact that both planets are in their own signs, answerable only to themselves and yet forced into confrontation. Furthermore, Uranus is introducing a radicalizing impulse to Mars through an opposition from Taurus. As Saturn attempts to contain and restrict the mounting volatility, what results is a simmering pressure cooker that threatens to blow at any moment.
Mars is feeling boxed in, the benefits of rulership made cold and hollow by the icy bummer vibes of Saturn. And yet, Mars is unable to find an obvious outlet for his growing need to introduce some radical new element into the equation. Or is he?
After Jack Skelington mopes away from the Halloween festivities, he wanders deep into the woods and stumbles on a clearing containing a strange set of trees, each with festively decorated doors that, presumably, lead to different holiday themed realms. Of all them, his eye is drawn to the tree shaped door, decorated in colorful Christmas lights, very different from anything he would encounter in the drab and dreary Halloween world he knows. Jack’s longed for unknown is right in front of him, and to reach it he simply has to step through the doorway.
While most of the planets are deadlocked in the Fixed sign conflagration, Venus is in Capricorn, a blessed island of peace, away from the roaring cacophony of unresolved tension. She is in an unassuming, but very available sextile with Mars. Now, no one can say that Mars doesn’t rise to the challenge of a square, as much as we might wish he wouldn’t sometimes. But Mars, particularly in Scorpio, truly thrives on the path of least resistance, and would much rather navigate around an obstacle then through one. Capricorn happens to be the sign of Mars’ exaltation. So, Venus is exalting Mars, or in other words, giving him something to be excited about. And as if she were not already irresistible, Venus is playing host and closely applying to a trine with Uranus in her home sign of Taurus. Venus is in essence, express delivering significations to Uranus, which is in turn blasting Mars with a galvanizing impulse to try things that are radically different, even out of character for him.
Much of what we experience as the holly and jolly of the ‘Christmas spirit’ is delivered through the much more festive lens of Sagittarius season, where most of the build up to the holiday takes place. But it is in fact in Capricorn where we show our love to friends and family in denominations of consumer goods, exercise our familial duties, and finally, face the inevitable financial hangover.
But for our purposes, Venus is Jack’s Christmas Town. Upon setting eyes on the strange and wonderous scene, Jack blunders through town with rapturous abandon, soaking in the novelties and alien customs of its soft and fleshy inhabitants. Having gorged his senses, Jack returns to Halloween Town, and in true Mars fashion, begins laying plans to commandeer the holiday for himself.
While Venus is in the sign of Mars’ exaltation, Mars is in a sign that is, archetypally anyway, antithetical to Venus. In other words, when Venus gets done in Scorpio - especially when infused with a Martian sense of urgency and a bit of Uranian weirdness - it can look a little like a community of monsters taking over Christmas, stuffing stockings with roadkill and wrapping up flying ghost dolls that attack children on site. Jack’s attempt at doing Christmas is not well received to say the least, a fact which he remains gleefully oblivious of, right up until the anti-aircraft guns start firing.
This lunar eclipse will come riding in on the back of the Mars-Uranus opposition going exact on the 17th. The Moon, having recently entered Taurus, is coming in about as empowered as a Moon can get. Its exalted, nearing its maximum illumination, and trine a pretty well situated Venus. Unfortunately, the Moon arrives just in time to land right in the blast zone.
Jack’s flying slay is shot down and sent plummeting to earth. He finds himself in a cemetery, surrounded by the burning remnants of his failed enterprise. Jack sinks into despondency, crushed by the realization that his dream has gone down in flames, and with disastrous consequences. Sinking deeper into shame and regret, he imagines a distant future where he is found, little more then a pile of old bones and a sad legacy of failure.
But this isn’t the end of the story for Jack. In fact this is the defining moment of the movie, the reason the movie is loved, and watched and re-watched by children and adults decades after it’s original release. It is the moment Jack, in accepting the death of his dream, the death of his grand vision of a reinvented self, rediscovers who he truly is.
And this is what the eclipse on November 19th, 2021 is building toward.
A crisis is the point in which the tension between two contradictory reality’s must be resolved. Crisis points are essentially destructive, as the two realities must become one, either by the elimination of one, or through a synthesis of both becoming one entirely new reality. Crises’ can be painful, even traumatic, but they are also a critical component of evolution and progress. An eclipse is in essence a crisis point, where the the ongoing creative tension between the Sun and Moon reaches a critical mass, resulting in the loss or diminishment of one thing, while clearing space for the birth of the new.
The emptiness and internal hunger for more, for change, is there to protect us from stagnation. The Scorpio-Taurus axis highlights the tension between breathing life into new form, cultivating, maintaining and refining it - and the pruning of excess, the decay that comes from stagnation and the will to cut ourselves away from it. It’s easy to get stuck in the failures of the past, and allow them to inhibit our progress. This eclipse is not asking you to confront your private museum of failures and disappointment, it’s demanding it from you. When people say that failure does not define you, they’re wrong. Failure is the chisel with which we carve ourselves into existence, over and over again. I have failed at many, many things, and when I do - after I’m done wallowing in self pity of course - I like to think of Jack Skellington, who in the wreckage of his shattered dreams gains a precious moment of clarity, the triumphant realization that he is, in absolute fact, The Pumpkin King.
