New Moon at 20 degrees of Capricorn: No Hand But My Own.

11 January 2024

The New Moon darkens at 20 degrees of Capricorn at 1:57pm Cyprus time. It heralds our movement in the elongated darkness of the night, still at the cathartic height of winter, still in the pregnant darkness. We are allowing the intensities of 23 to wash over us as we deal with the moving parts of ourselves and our realities. The first new moon of the year brings a sense of history with it. An inventory of choices that we need to mull over and understand our role therein. Before being able to strive, we must accept the materials we have to work with and the mental balances that are still pending for deeper resolution. We are asked to allow within ourselves and our realities, the evocation of the wonder of our gifts and the tragedy of our transgressions and sit at the table with both of these talking into the small hours of the morning. 

We must come to understand them well if we are to balance the foundation upon which we stand to create our material matrix. There can be no fruit if we don’t feel the rain of our mistakes. There needs to be a recognition of inner resources and of the injustice of letting them hide within. Capricorn is usually interpreted as building materiality in a cardinal, forward moving fashion. This seems to be the external manifestation of Capricornian energy but does not fully represent the hidden yin nocturnal process of this sign. In the darkness of winter, hope is our greatest antidote and in this way hope is at the core of the inner Capricornian process, sitting in the mystery holding on to hope that we may be able to grow in time. We strategize our responsibilities to ourselves and to our world and in there find a remembrance of a definitive purpose; of choosing that which we will carve out of the vastness of self. It is the big inner movements, like tectonic shifts, that allow for the building of the physical mountain. 

The New Moon brings in it the awareness of the limits of our material existence and sheds light on the reasons why we feel compelled to create something. The Capricornian process necessitates the arrival to wisdom that comes from a  sense of responsibility towards the conjuring of the reality dreamt up inside. It requires an adequate reckoning of inner fears, of that which may at last not be made, or of that which may not endure. Within the melancholy of this moon,lie questions that can provide reality-directing decisions, what are we becoming, what is unharnessed within our lives.

 New life contains loss of something, the observation of your deep inner movements can point you towards that which will allow you to struggle out from the great weight of yourself into a sense of deeper security. I sometimes have a hard time allowing myself to become, to sit in full acceptance of what I owe to myself  and these last few months have taken me through a ghost of xmas past tour of all the times I have placed something between me and the material reality I wanted to create. I have had to reckon with compulsions and fears of my own manifested power, and of all the moments I allowed fear to keep me doing something less than what I wanted. The loss of time and prolonging of ends. To hear and heed the inner voice is ultimately what must be made out. A song of freedom is faintly heard. 

The New Moon also trines Uranus in Taurus inviting in some clarifying energy and the ability to ‘see’ into things that were not yet available for full confrontation. Uranus supports the process by contributing to the upheaval and the necessary shaking up of stagnated Saturnian energy. There is a vision beyond the boundary (Uranus) that is being invited in and that requires definite change within ourselves to accommodate. Uranus gives us a vision of liberation, but it does not come without the bound of Saturn’s work, otherwise the impulse remains ethereal and unable to pierce the bounds of material reality. Uranus is the clarifier in this moon bringing a sense of hope and inspiration to undertake that which is being whispered within and allowing for a ‘breaking’ of the self, for fresh water to drip into a parched mouth. 

We are closing up an era with Pluto at the last degree of Capricorn which is also widely conjuncting our Moon. Pluto is the purger, un-earther and evolutionary dismantler and has opened us up to the nature of institutional purging we need within our societies. Since Pluto’s entry in Capricorn in 2008, we have experienced the uncovering of what’s wrong with our economic, religious and  political systems, the financial dominance of the military-industrial complex and the acute levels of corruption in all institutional aspects of society. We are living through times of structural dissolution where we are being called more to rely on our inner resources, and envision structures that we would rather externalise ourselves in. Pluto will be moving retrograde a couple more times into Capricorn finishing up loose ends. 

This year, Pluto will move into Aquarius for a 19 year cycle regarding our freedom of information and ideas, the rapidness of our progress and its inherent lapses, getting ahead of our humanity and how we are collectively deciding to employ technology.  To think of Aquarius as the sign where the Sun is exiled is interesting, we may see a rise in collectivity and a desire to dismantle hierarchical systems. However, the weaponization of technological advancement can be a powerful tool for the expression of authoritarianism in our world, AI has already been used as a weapon of war. Censorship is rampant and the ways in which we can be subtly steered as a society have become ubiquitous and nefarious. I believe that we will come to see more of the underbelly of technological advancement and the consequences of the money of billionaire phallic rocket types whose preference for eternally voracious progress and colonising activities when Earth is in shambles creates a massive polarisation between our envisioned future as humans and our past. Our responsibility is to our home first.

No hand but my own

dips into the business

that creates

that destroys

my life.

No hand but my own

knows how to hold

what I hold

for the world.

No hand but my own

can free me

can entrap me

all in the same stroke.

No hand but my own

can reach for the hands of those I love.

No hand but my own

can provide the work

that will make me.

No hand but my own

can reach out to God.

No hand but my own

can make the cut.

that releases me onto the world.