We’re headed into another month of eclipses. On Oct. 14 we will have a solar eclipse in the sign of Libra, and on Oct. 28 we’ll have a lunar eclipse in the sign of Taurus. These eclipses stand out because they are in the two signs of which Venus is the planetary ruler. In contrast, the eclipses we had in late April and early May of this year were in Mars’s signs. Those eclipses were about breaking rank and taking a stand for our individual truths. These coming eclipses are about trying to find solutions and make it work.
“Eclipse season” occurs twice a year, even if the eclipses are not visible from our location. Eclipses occur around what is called the lunar “nodes,” meaning knot — the sticking points of fate.
One cannot deal with astrology without simultaneously confronting questions of fate. As with any predictive art, astrology begs the question of fate versus free will, the extent to which certain paths are flexible or inevitable. When we are talking about fate, we are talking about fulfilling a role that has been predetermined, such that all others can fulfill their roles and the whole project progresses toward some goal that transcends our understanding.
In graduate school, I took courses on family therapy. In one demonstration, a group of students role playing a family was asked to stand inside a giant rubber band, about the size of a large hula hoop. The idea was to demonstrate how different levels of tension or distance affected everyone within the family unit. If one member tried to withdraw, the others were pushed closer together by the tension of the band. Eclipses bring about sudden beginnings and endings, as often from inner epiphanies as from outward events. Often one finds a kind of fate-like quality to these nudges, a feeling of being pulled toward or away from something, and the source of the pull existing outside of one’s own heart and mind.
The strength of these pulls and the effect of individual eclipses or eclipse series will vary by each individual chart and how the eclipses fall within it. As with the rubber band example, even if you yourself are not affected directly, it’s likely someone you are close to will be chewing on some big questions this month.
The individual view of fate is a question most relevant to heroes because it is an illusion that individuality exists in a vacuum.
We are all suspended in the vastness of space by an indefinite number of “rubber bands.” Socially, culturally, emotionally, and politically, bound by physics and chemistry, by all our current theories of how things work, and all the theories and laws we will discover.
Venus, and her sign of Libra, where a solar eclipse will occur this Saturday, Oct. 14, is about recognizing our interconnectedness. Not only as a philosophical concept, but how our roles change and weave through each other’s stories. Libra is about restoring balance and holding everything in proportion.
Eclipses are not the agents of change. You are the agent of change. Eclipses are the invitation to look again and see where you have held on so tightly to a way something needed to be that you abandon what it was in its becoming. If you can let go of the story, you free yourself and inevitably others to follow that intuitive tug toward the next inner or outer adventure.
Oct. 14 solar eclipse path prediction by Fred Espenak, NASA http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/