Today’s Lunar Eclipse in Cancer (and Sunday’s exact conjunction between Saturn and Pluto) marks the culmination of the emotional intensity behind the long slow build up of pressure and tension in Capricorn. This weekend marks the climax of multiple nested stories of different lengths, some of which reach back deep into our collective history. The tensions are at their most taut: USA and Iran, India and Kashmir, China and Hong Kong, and in so many other places in the world; and in our personal lives as well.
While the Moon is full in Cancer, the light of the Sun cannot fully reach the Moon, for Earth stands in the way. We are in the dark, in the shadow. Not only does the Sun stand on the shadowy other side of the Earth, but so does Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter, and Mercury, which are all in Capricorn. The Moon, at the North Node, calls to us to lean into Cancer: feeling, nurturing, and tenderness. But clearly the balance of power lies in Capricorn: structure, authority, hierarchy. Both suggest themes around security, survival, and safety.
The buildup in Capricorn represents the collective shadow of history. Please see my last few posts for an exploration of this (intro, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3). The North Node in Cancer represents The Call. It may be out of our comfort zone, it may not feel natural, but as we develop the qualities of the North Node, we evolve. The North Node is the future. In Cancer, the invitation is to cultivate care, compassion, forgiveness. It’s through fostering connection, family, tribe, community. It’s through taking care of one another. It’s through working to integrate an ethic of care into our systems and structures.
Cancer is not just what we arrive at after the shadow work (explored in my previous posts), and difficult process of rebuilding; it’s how we get there. If don’t approach our own shadow with compassion and forgiveness, then we are likely to retraumatize ourselves, or elicit more guilt and depression. As the crab has a shell, Cancer seeks protection, and can be defensive. But underneath the shell, there is tenderness, and deep feeling. And by moving through emotion, in the way it does, side to side, through the sea, Cancer creates, tends to, cares for.
Cancer represents (chosen) family. The North Node in Cancer, song of the sea: “there is no way through this but together. Let’s take care of one another.” Capricorn thinks it can do it alone, but Cancer know that’s literal insanity. We all need support, help, care. We need to garner all our resources--and particularly our emotional, familial, community, and spiritual resources. Cancer, as the Moon’s sign, knows how to hold space. What’s needed now, more than anything, is for us to hold space for each other to process all this difficult stuff, to examine and release the ideology and conditioning that doesn’t serve, to feel into another way.
We tend to think change will require some great exhausting effort. That we will have to gear up for it and push really hard. But the change required now is to stop going about things in that way. To stop forcing and pushing. To do less, consume less, work less. Yes, Saturn in Cap lends itself to discipline and work. But as Saturn is with the South Node, we are called on to release the unhealthy patterns of Saturn, and that includes force and over-effort.
This is a long cycle that is ending, we are clearing out the aspects of patriarchy that we’ve absorbed. We are evolving into a different mode of Saturn: effortless effort. When we are in alignment with our soul, we don’t need to divide ourselves and make ourselves do anything; we are naturally inspired to work. When we are in sync with natural cycles (governed by Saturn), there is greater ease.
Immature Capricorn can only imagine order as linear hierarchy imposed onto nature. Another way of Capricorn is to see that from what appears to be the chaotic forces and flows of nature, beautiful and complex structures emerge spontaneously. The ego does not need to force structures into being. It can lean into and tend to and nurture and work with the structures that naturally emerge when we allow them to. If we can trust in nature in that way then what kind of world might we create?
So, collectively, and individually, we are grappling with the shadows of a long, fraught history. We are considering not just the impersonal forces of history, but the ways in which our own histories--personal, cultural, and ancestral--have woven into those. This is to acknowledge the trauma that has been inherited as well as the complicity; to see our inheritance as contextualized within history at large. Most of us have inherited attitudes, behaviours, illnesses, patterns, that stem directly from oppression; as well as those that support oppression. It’s not as simple as victim or perpetrator: we all have blood on our hands.
How has your ancestry woven through the threads of patriarchal, hierarchical, oppressive history? Look for ways you may have assimilated ideologies of subservience or dominance. Do you feel like you have no say, no authority in your own life? Do you feel at the whim of the government or other institutions? Or do you feel validated by your career, superior in your success--or the opposite? Do you feel you have a right to more resources than others? Do you feel you do not deserve resources like others? Do you feel you must amass wealth to keep yourself safe? Look for ways you may be fearful, rigid, controlling, dominating, or identified with the system (strategies some of us are taught to survive within the system). Trauma may create fear around resources, safety, and security. That in turn may lead to overworking, accumulating resources (hoarding), fear around lack, fear of the other.
Fear is a major theme at this time. And it is not something to avoid, but rather to investigate. If fear has been triggered within you, what’s that about? Get curious about your own fear. What thoughts enable it? How does it operate within you? To what extent is fear a tactic of control? What actually is it that you’re afraid of? From my perspective, it looks more and more like our fear responses are deeply conditioned by precisely this fraught history, and is part of its structure. Fear of scarcity, fear of the other, fear of violence--all these work to reinforce oppressive systems. Which is not to say that people are at fault for their fear. So, this is certainly no easy task, but: is there a way to respond to the current climate of tension, violence, and control, with something other than fear? (I don’t know the answer).
Many of our dysfunctional behaviours were functional adaptations to a punishing system. So as you get really real with yourself and grasp even the worst in yourself, have compassion. On the one hand, take responsibility for where you’ve made mistakes. Simultaneously see that we are trying to survive, and we’ve been through a lot. With this greater awareness, we might see how coping mechanisms create pain for others. This whole mess of victim and perpetrator, of oppressed and oppressor, of coping mechanisms and trauma--it’s all tied up together. We’re all at fault, and none of us are.
This work is bound to elicit all kinds of feelings from guilt to shame to anger to despair. So, please, be gentle with yourself. Remember Cancer: remember care, and softness, and support, and guauge when it’s time to rest, time to ask for help, time to nap, or to eat macaroni.
Guilt and shame are complicated. They have been used as weapons. A collective morality has been imposed onto us that coerces us to act in ways that may not be in our own best interest, but that support the established powers. An examination of our own moral assumptions is key at this time too. Blind morality and no morality are equally dangerous. Isn’t it time we considered what we believe to be ethical?
That said, guilt is important--it directs us to acknowledge where we’ve strayed from our moral code and how we may address that and act differently in the future. And then, once we’ve taken that important step, then we need to forgive ourselves, so that we can let go and move on. I like Brene Brown’s distinction between shame and guilt, where guilt is necessary and helpful, whereas shame is the feeling we’ve done something wrong when we in fact have not. And there may be a whole load of shame as well as guilt, waiting to be felt and processed. For all the ways in which our beautiful and creative and divine knowing and power has been shut down through our lifetimes, for all the ways we’ve ingested the message that we are not ok, not good, not divine: all the ways that the Saturnian impulse has been directed at us through violent and oppressive means.
And as we work through our shame, we may also see the ways in which we’ve been complicit in the violent shaming and controlling of others, perhaps in big ways, perhaps in subtle ones. But to the extent that we live at this time in this world, we can’t help having integrated these violent ways of thinking and being, because they run to the very roots of our world.
We all have work to do, which is not to say that we are equally responsible for the violence and oppression that the systems we engage with perpetrate. Some of us have more culpability that others--and that is something we each address as we descend the steps. But to some extent, we will all be healing from trauma, and we will all be grappling with our culpability in perpetuating trauma, perhaps simply to the extent that we participate in systems that are oppressive--and to some extent, we all do.
This work requires first of all that we are willing to be right here. Wherever we are, right in this moment, right now. A prominent way of coping with trauma--we all, to varying extents, live with trauma, because we all live in this world--is to not be fully here. Because here is where the trauma happened. Here there is pain. And yet if we are not here, we cannot be with the truth of our soul, we cannot acknowledge what the Plutonic is bringing forth for us to be with and feel into and move through in order that we may heal.
So the first step, with Cancer, is to feel whatever is arising. To see it, be with it, accept it, allow it to be there. To trust the natural processes to move through. To remember that we are part of nature, nature is incredibly intelligent, and that we will heal if we just allow. It’s all the forcing and controlling that prevents the healing. To trust that healing will come when we can sit with our feelings, and love ourselves and forgive ourselves, and observe the feelings as they move. And to employ whatever practices speak to us: journalling, psychotherapy, bodywork, tarot, astrology, song, prayer, meditation. There are so many tools that can support us.
As we do this work, we literally become more conscious; for what was unconscious becomes conscious. And in this way, we evolve. As we as individuals engage in this process, we learn how to evolve the use of Saturn, so that it supports and works with the Plutonic, rather than seeking to control and repress. And as more and more of us engage in such work, the collective will change as well.
And as we begin to ascend the steps again, after that courageous descent, we may find, that--even given all our flaws, all our humanness--maybe we’re not so bad. We’ve been through so much in the past few millennia, and we’ve managed to survive somehow. And we’ve come through all the pain with some heart, yet. Some grace and humour and wisdom. Maybe we can even find it within ourselves to forgive ourselves.
As we help each other through this process, down the stairs, and then back up--and we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again--we change. And then whatever work it is that we do in the world, we will do that differently. Perhaps some of us will change work, or set out on a different route, but perhaps we will just do whatever it is we are doing, from that new orientation. As we bring more consciousness into our work, as people from all sectors of our society change, our society will change too.
So it’s not as if we need to find some theoretical solutions to our problems and then impose it onto the world. The attempt to have it all figured out, to design a perfect system, is more shadow. The world will change as we do. Not according to some grand scheme, but as the organic emergence of all our acts. And as we become aware of the ways worlds are imposed onto us, as ideology and conditioning and control, we take our power back, little by little. If we are willing to begin before knowing where we are headed, then we have the hope of creating something more supportive of life and creativity. This new world will be more clear over the coming years. But only because those of us courageous enough to step over the threshold before clearly seeing what lies beyond, will lead the way.