New Moon in Pisces | March 2022
New Moon in Pisces
2 March 2022
12:34 PM EST
Brave dreamers, welcome to this lunation in Pisces.
First, before we dive into some musings, it feels right to name and speak to the emotions and tensions running high around the world in this moment. Pisces is a water sign— this is a feeling moon, a moon of compassion, a moon for empathy, a moon of remembering our interbeing-ness, a moon of letting the energy dance but not drown us. Feel it. Feel it all. Express it creatively. Sing, dance, scream, shake, run, paint, write the energies through you. Let your big heart be tender.
This month begins the swell of Piscean and Neptunian energy building toward the crest of the Neptune-Jupiter conjunction on April 12. In fact, this entire year is colored by the energy of this big conjunction towards which we are building. It’s a watery, dreamy, artistic, mystic, compassionate, and perhaps confusing and chaotic year, astro-energetically speaking (and otherwise).
As the 12th and last sign, Pisces is often characterized by endings and completions. Astrologically, our new year begins March 20, at the spring equinox when the Sun moves into Aries, the first of the twelve zodiac signs.
As a threshold keeper or gateway, Pisces is about transcendent consciousness, going beyond known worlds and former boundaries of self or reality to discover something new. This begins in imagination. Everything new must first be imagined.
Let’s look to nature for her wisdom on imagination, transformation, endings and beginnings. Let’s talk creepy crawlers and bright winged ones. Yes, the caterpillar and the butterfly. It’s a bit trite – but only because it holds such a powerful teaching do we return to it again and again in describing radical transformation.
How does one become another? How do we move from what has been into something entirely new? We must first imagine it. Let’s go on a little circuitous, non-linear wander, Neptune/Pisces-style together, shall we?
Mythos of Morphos
A caterpillar spends its days crawling along, through dirt and vegetation, consuming, consuming, consuming. A caterpillar eats hundreds of times its weight in a single day. Eventually, it gets too heavy to continue on and hangs itself up on a branch, a chrysalis forming around its body.
Before this caterpillar was born, it was seeded with something called imaginal discs. These are specialized cells that support every single aspect of what this creature will eventually become. These are its butterfly blueprint. But they are dormant while the caterpillar does its caterpillar life. Nothing of what it will become is outwardly expressing yet. But it is all inside.
When a caterpillar goes into chrysalis phase, it looks like death by most definitions. And really it is the death of the caterpillar. That consuming caterpillar literally digests itself. In Neptunian fashion, it literally dissolves all of its tissues, going back to some primordial oceanic undifferentiated soup.
Yet inside this cellular soup, the imaginal ones spring to life. They become activated in and by the very dissolution itself. The old caterpillar, or old consciousness, does not recognize these new ones organizing. So, it attacks them. What Has Been attacks the Unrecognizable New. (Ahem, Saturn square Uranus)
Yet, the new ones cannot be stopped. They continue to build and they connect to one another. Their blueprint becomes enacted, the old cells give up from the stress of it, and the tables turn. The imaginal cells now feed on the caterpillar soup, turning the old material into a new form. A butterfly is born.
This too, perhaps, is how consciousness shifts, inside and among us. To interface with this process within is the metamorphic invitation of this month … and year.
In the case of this creature, the imaginal is the bridge between the caterpillar and the butterfly. In our psyches, the imaginal is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious.
The imaginal in our psyches
Just like in the butterfly, our unconscious contains the primal pattern, or the blueprint, of our potential – all that we have the capacity to express and become in this lifetime.
“This pattern, this invisible latticework of energy, contains all the traits, all the strengths, the faults, the basic structure and parts that will make up a total psychological being,” says depth psychologist Robert A Johnson in his book Inner Work. (A treasure of a book, by the way).
He further asserts that we must do the work of moving from the level of potential to the level of expression by bridging what is in the unconscious into consciousness. This is the heart of the Piscean archetype. (Even the glyph is of the two opposite-moving fish united by the bridge of transcendent consciousness).
What Jungians call individuation is the process of “actualizing the blueprint.” It is the process of becoming the winged one within our own lives. To become winged, we must cocoon deep into our inner being to awaken + interface with the imaginal.
Material moves from the unconscious to the conscious through two main channels or pathways: dreams and imagination, also squarely in the domain of Pisces/Neptune. Dreams are an assemblage of images the unconscious offers to our conscious minds to activate the blueprint, to reveal the deep forces and patterns seeking awareness. Imagination is “an organ of coherent communication, that employs a highly refined complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious” (Johnson).
(Side note: The Soul Guidance work I offer is deeply rooted in the imaginal so we can get to the deepest layers of the self for activation and meaningful soul-directed transformation. You can learn more about this work here.
Symbols for the New Moon
Ironically, there are two degree symbols for this new moon that open this exploration up even further. The Chandra symbol of this degree in Pisces is “A woman imprisoned in a high tower,” while the Omega symbol is “A castle so vast no one has ever explored all of it.”
The first symbol could be read as analogous to how we might be trapped in the conscious mind (the tower) without access to the whole of ourselves via our unconscious.
The latter speaks to the vast nature of the unconscious, the totality of our beings, and cautions us not to get lost in the vast sea of the deep psyche (being lost, escapism and delusion is the shadow of Pisces). As such, we need both the ability to swim the oceanic amniotic seas of the unconscious and the ability to bring the needed blueprint material to consciousness, to the containment of the Self.
So what to do?
Whew, deep work. So what to do? Pay attention to your dreams, waking and night. Write them down, see them as a set of curious communications from your deep inner blueprint. Work with archetypes –– the patterns in our psyches, spelled out in the cosmos, in myth, in our inner worlds. Let them be clues to the deeper forces at work within you, making their way toward consciousness. Ally with the whole of you.
Collectively, we might read into the imaginal cell metaphor the path we must walk was the awakeners of the new –– the ones with butterfly consciousness, who are here to enact the potential within humanity. Remember, it happens through dissolution, by way of deep inner work, and by the old ways mounting a defense, while the new ones gather and activate. Perhaps it is encouraging to think of this stage in our collective evolution as built into the very blueprint of our becoming.
Of course, that doesn’t make working in the mush easy.
The key is in connections. In bridge-building. In uniting the opposites through transcendent consciousness.
New Moon Sky Signatures
New Moon conjunct Jupiter: Jupiter amplifies whatever it touches, potentizing and expanding the energies of this new moon.
Saturn conjunct Mercury: After its deep metamorphic series of transformational meetings with Pluto earlier this year, Mercury is now meeting with Saturn. Saturn can help us take forward action to grow and mature in our potential. To make real progress based on what is so now. This conjunction may be inviting you to consider: in what ways has my cognition, perception and communication shifted within, and how might my outer behaviors and actions now come to reflect this change?
In other words, how will you take practical action on the deeper inner revelations you’ve received lately?
Stellium: Pluto, Mars, Venus, and Vesta: oh yeah, and this crew. Mars, the masculine principle in all creation, and Venus, the feminine principle in all creation have been dancing through the sky together for weeks now, and will continue in a close sky waltz for a while longer still. At these two essential forces of existence come together in the sky, they are held between Vesta, the asteroid of devotion and wholeness, and Pluto, the planet of intense transformation. Both the masculine and feminine within us are being asked: what needs to be burned away within each of you so that you may dance together? What must be shed so that you can come into deeper devotion? Greater wholeness?
With Pluto in the late degrees of Capricorn continuing to compost the dying structures and systems, this joining with Mars and Venus here is suggesting this work is personal as well as political right now. While there is much chaos happening out there, this is also time to look within and do the inner alchemical work, as described above.
March 2022 Astrology
March 5 – Sun conjunct Jupiter: a day for expansion of the Piscean realm: dream big
March 6 – Mars and Venus move into Aquarius together, meeting at the same degree at which we had the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 2020: we the people
March 9 – Mercury into Pisces: Tend your dreams and visions
March 13 – Sun conjunct Neptune: illuminate the visions and delusions
March 18 – Full Moon at 27º Virgo: it’s a pretty dreamy full moon, Bring your visions into form
March 20 – Spring Equinox, Sun into Aries
March 21 – Mercury conjunct Jupiter: expand your mind
March 23 – Mercury conjunct Neptune: creative thinking
March 27 – Mercury into Aries: intuitive thinking in action
March 28 – Venus, Saturn, Moon, Juno and Mars stellium in Aquarius
Announcements: LUMINARY is here!
I’ve just opened the doors to a new astrology certification program, a mystery school really, to share the deep wisdom of a soul-level astrology practice. If this calls to you, please learn more here.