You
can follow the current eclipse cycles in your birth chart
with my popular eclipse report, "Followed
by a Moonshadow." Three years of eclipse
cycles in a 40+ page report. More
info...
I became an astrological eclipse-watcher completely by
accident. In the early days of my practice, I decided
one week to prepare a lecture on eclipse cycles for my
intermediate astrology class. I did a little research
and found quite a bit that had been written about the
astrology of eclipses applied to politics, natural disasters,
and sundry portents of doom. I found little, though, that
reflected the practical, everyday concerns of my students.
So I began to develop a lesson plan based on what I knew
- which, admittedly, wasn't much.
I knew, for instance, that eclipses move through the
birth chart approximately every eighteen years, so that
an eclipse makes the same aspect to roughly the same point
in your birth chart about every eighteen years. In astrology,
the quarter and halfway points in a cycle are also very
potent. So if eclipses meant anything, they would presumably
transmit their message across a cycle of eighteen years,
with cosmic punctuation marks occurring at intervals of
four and a half years. Here, at least, was a framework
on which to hang my tenuous lesson plan; but unlike planets
and their cycles, the astrological message of eclipses
wasn't clear. What did eclipses mean?
I didn't have a clear answer for my class that week,
but I was hooked. In the years that followed, I peered
into the charts of my clients, family, and friends to
observe what happened when eclipses shook up their lives.
I set about deconstructing my own life, isolating major
events and listing the eclipses that occurred in the same
years. And what I found was that the most pivotal events
of my life tended to have something in common: eclipses,
forming aspects to the same few, sensitive areas of my
birth chart. I began to develop a sense that eclipses
forecasted scary, prickly moments of truth, turning points,
when something important is changing and the landscape
of your life suddenly looks unfamiliar, even alien.
June, 1970. I was watching Captain
Kangaroo with my sister the morning they came to tell
us our father was dead. It was the first day of June,
1970, a morning of clear and dazzling light and a sky
washed clean from the previous night's rainstorm.
A knock at the back door. The
sound of muffled voices; I recognize one as my uncle's.
I step cautiously to the door of the kitchen; I can
make out a few words… "Jim Lewis…"
"through the windshield"… and my mother
begins to cry, to sob. I gather something has happened
to "Uncle Jim," a family friend. What does
it have to do with us? My aunt is moving toward me through
the kitchen, a stricken look on her face; she reaches
me at the precise moment I hear my mother's voice screaming
into the phone, jagged as cut glass, "Where is
my husband? What have you done with my husband?"
My aunt gathers me up and holds
on tight, and that's when I realize it wasn't Uncle
Jim who went through the windshield of his car that
rainy night. It was my father. I hide my face in the
comforting familiarity of my aunt's calico housedress,
and I begin to cry; I barely stop for three months.
Carlos Castaneda writes of Don Juan's teachings about
the "assemblage point," one's innate sense of
balance, which can suddenly shift in response to an unexpected
event. Likewise, an eclipse signals that something in
you has shifted, as surely as an earthquake shifts the
foundation of a house. Sometimes, the shift is subtle;
a crack in the plaster, a picture that falls off a wall.
Other times, when the eclipse point makes a close aspect
to a difficult planetary combination in your birth chart
- as it did for me in1970, when my father died - your
whole house is picked up and shaken.
This year's eclipses, then, resonate with eclipses that
happened nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, even thirty-six
years ago. What were you doing then? Those years, and
the things that happened to you then, are relevant to
your life right now. The eclipses that happened then are
cosmic cousins of this year's eclipses, whispering across
the years, urging you to pick up a dropped thread of your
life's narrative….
September 1988. I'm huddled in a phone
booth in Sydney, Australia, hysterical, explaining to
my mother that the boyfriend I just traveled all the
way around the world to visit is completely and utterly
out of his mind. Twenty-seven years my senior, he has
always been a bit eccentric, and I knew he was probably
an alcoholic. But in the two years since I last saw
him he has developed full-blown mental illness; last
night he woke me up at 2:00 a.m., checking the overhead
light fixtures for hidden cameras. Mom is concerned,
but there is nothing she can do for me. I can't even
get a flight out for two more days. I am stranded thousands
of miles from everyone who knows and loves me, and I
am staying with a crazy man. I hang up the phone and
stand there for a moment, listening to the monorail
train pass overhead. I've never felt more alone in my
life.
Mark Twain once famously wrote, "History doesn't
repeat itself, but it rhymes." Losing my father,
being stranded far from home with an unreliable man…
these are separate acts in a long-running play whose central
plot centers around the wisdom of relying on men for my
security. Not surprisingly, eclipses in both of these
years made difficult aspects to the Moon (symbolizing
security) and Pluto (symbolizing threatening forces beyond
our control) in my birth chart. And each year marked a
turning point in my ongoing Moon/Pluto struggle to acquire
emotional self-reliance.
The way eclipses work.
We think of eclipses as rare, but in fact, solar eclipses
occur every six months at the New Moon, within a few days
of the Sun's conjunction with the North and South Lunar
Nodes. Solar eclipses are usually, but not always, accompanied
by a lunar eclipse at the Full Moon before or after the
solar eclipse.
Some astrologers argue that there is a difference between
solar eclipses and lunar ones, associating them, respectively,
with external and internal events. Personally, I've never
gotten much insight from this distinction. After all,
solar and lunar eclipses occur within a mere two weeks
of each other. Likewise, outer events and inner ones tend
to happen close together. One may happen slightly ahead
of the other, but for all practical purposes they happen
in tandem. For me, the fascination of eclipses, be they
solar or lunar, is the change they portend - and almost
always, we change on the inside and the outside, all at
the same time.
Eclipses in Houses
As they move through the houses of the horoscope, eclipses
reveal the landscape that is being altered, the areas
where you are changing, growing, muddling through unfamiliar
territory. In short, they describe where you are currently
most interesting.
Eclipses move clockwise through your chart (unlike normal
transits, which move counter-clockwise), falling in the
six house axes (teams of two houses which are directly
opposite one another) of the chart approximately every
nine years, like so:
1st house / 7th house
12th house / 6th house
11th house / 5th house
10th house / 4th house
9th house / 3rd house
8th house / 2nd house
The sizes of these house axes vary depending upon which
house system you're using, and where you were born. For
instance, people born extremely north or south of the
equator will have one or two of these axes that are extremely
large, while the rest of the houses are very small. Obviously,
as eclipses move through your chart, they will pass more
quickly through a very small house axis than through a
very large one. On average, though, each house axis of
your chart will be sensitized by eclipses for one to two
years at a time.
Eclipses in Aspect to Natal Planets
Eclipses tend to be more keenly felt when they form
close aspects to planets in your birth chart --especially
by conjunction (0 degrees), square (90 degrees),
or opposition (180 degrees). And when an eclipse
makes an aspect to one natal planet which in turn aspects
other natal planets, all of them feel the reverberations.
When this matrix of interconnected planets receives an
aspect from an eclipse, a narrative emerges that, like
my Moon/Pluto eclipse story of loss and insecurity, gets
repeated over and over throughout your lifetime. Eventually,
it becomes as familiar as the plot of a movie you've seen
many times before.
Look to the personal planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus,
Mars) in aspect to the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) to find the most sensitive planetary
combinations in your birth chart. Unless an eclipse triggers
these high-tension aspects in your natal chart, or falls
very close to the cusps of the first, fourth, seventh,
or tenth houses, you are likely to experience it as a
relatively subtle influence, the flutter of a leaf in
a chilling breeze. But each time one of the high-tension
planets is aspected by wandering eclipse, you are given
another opportunity to face down one of your fundamental
fears - perhaps a fear of anonymity (the Sun), of sexuality
(Mars), of authoring your own life (Saturn), or of reality
(Neptune).
It's not all bad
Not all eclipses are associated with what we think of
as unhappy events. Many coincide with joyous moments,
such as a marriage, or the birth of a child. But because
we don't expect to be frightened or disoriented by positive
events, and receive little support from others for our
feelings ("For heaven's sake, can't you even enjoy
it when something good happens to you?"), these positive
eclipse turning points are in some ways more traumatic
than tragic ones. The truth is, even choosing something
good for yourself can shake up your life and call forth
old fears….
May 1993 In a couple of weeks
I'm getting married, to the kindest man I've ever known.
Ever since my father died, I've been wary of depending
on others; but now I'm choosing to become completely
interdependent - and I'm absolutely terrified. What
if he suddenly dies? What if he takes me away, someday,
to his native New Zealand and then something happens
to him, and I'm stranded there, far from home?
One day, as we chat about wedding
plans, he accidentally calls me by his ex-girlfriend's
name. Already stretched to the breaking point by the
tension of the wedding plans, I shatter like glass,
and run from the room. I fall on the guestroom bed,
weeping. How can I marry someone who calls me by another
woman's name?
Almost immediately, I know how
silly I'm being, and how much of my reaction is about
all those deeper, older fears of intimacy. I know, now,
about eclipses, and those old wounds to the lunar and
Plutonian parts of me. "So what if all those things
happen, the things you fear?" whispers the steely,
eclipse-tested part of my psyche. "They've happened
before and you lived through them. Be happy now."
My poor, abashed beloved hurries into the guestroom
to apologize and to comfort me; but I'm already feeling
much better.
The latitudes of home
Because it is painful to remember the scary moments
of the past or contemplate the uncertainty of the future,
we tend to go through life ignoring the reality that our
entire lives can be irrevocably changed in an instant.
Every now and then, when someone close to us dies, a terrorist
attack wounds our country, or some other personal crisis
shakes us up, we are startled awake for a moment and behold
a landscape we scarcely recognize. Our instinct, then,
is to turn away as quickly as possible and return to the
latitudes of home.
But even after life returns to normal, the shadowy image
of the eclipse remains emblazoned on the psyche. Each
time the eclipse's shadow falls across one of our guiding
lights, we awaken to old fears and, hopefully, get a bit
better at facing them. But the eclipse-touched places
in us remain a little ajar, just below the surface. They
are as rich as freshly-plowed earth and ready to receive
the seeds of startling change - even after we've returned
to our everyday lives, and have gone back to pretending
that the sun and moon will never disappear again.
Note: "The latitudes of home" is a phrase
borrowed from Annie Dillard's essay, "Total Eclipse,"
in The Annie Dillard Reader, HarperCollins, 1994.
This article originally appeared in Llewellyn's
2006 Moon Sign Book.
