TRANSCRIPT Ep. 233 | Taurus New Moon: Holding the Bag!

TRANSCRIPT Ep. 233 | Taurus New Moon: Holding the Bag! (May 6, 2024)

Hello Invisible Friend, April here, and the date today is May 6, 2024. Welcome to Episode 233 of the Big Sky Astrology Podcast. This week, the Taurus New Moon and the Sun’s elegant sextile to Saturn are the major astrological news, and I answer a listener question about the progressed lunar phases.

Taurus New Moon (May 7, 2024, 8:22 pm PDT)

The week begins with the Moon Report and the Taurus New Moon on May 7th at 8:22 pm Pacific Time. It’s at 18 º 2’ Taurus, on the Sabian symbol, 19 Taurus, A newly formed continent. Each year, the Taurus New Moon is effective for formulating intentions or rituals around money, earning power, possessions, values, and security.

If for any reason you feel insecure, particularly in the area of life symbolized by the house that Taurus falls in your chart, this is the New Moon each year to take a look at why and to evaluate the ways that you can make yourself feel more secure. This may have to do with how you’re earning or managing your money, whether physical possessions can really address emotional deficits, and, whether your physical home feels safe and well cared for.

This New Moon point is very close to Uranus and Jupiter, which came together in a conjunction on April 20th. So, this New Moon resonates to some degree with some of the things that we experienced at that conjunction. If the point of the conjunction between Jupiter and Uranus, which was 21º 49 ‘ Taurus – if that closely aspected something in your birth chart, you may just now be beginning to understand what it all meant.

So there is big energy in this New Moon chart, that big energy of Jupiter and Uranus. And it takes big energy to push up a newly formed continent, like the one we see in the Sabian symbol for this New Moon. The Sun and Moon in this lovely sextile aspect of Saturn gives the opportunity to create a new platform for being in the world; to help us use some of this very exciting Jupiter-Uranus symbolism. If you’ve been needing to do some big home repairs, if you want to increase your income by applying for a raise or a new job, whether there’s a big purchase you’ve been saving up for, this is an exciting New Moon to get going on these projects.

Lunar Phase Family Cycle

This New Moon initiates a lunar phase family cycle that will continue over the next 36 months. What is initiated at this New Moon may not be exactly what we hope or think that it would be. We have particular ideas about each sign of the zodiac and what it might represent to us. But sometimes the things that emerge at the New Moon defy our predictions, but at the same time, in hindsight, they seem appropriate.

What I suggest people do at each New Moon is just make a random list of what is important in your life right now, today, not necessarily what you’re aiming for, what you are trying to formulate for the future, but what is happening today, to yourself, to the people closest to you, and even if it seems like something that’s not that important, make a note of it. Because you will see how this little kernel, this little seed, can sometimes grow over the three years of the lunar phase family cycle.

The First Quarter phase in this lunar phase family cycle comes on February 5th, 2025, with the Moon at 16º 46‘ Taurus. And that is the time when some kind of movement happens, some kind of action moves this New Moon’s objectives further along. Again, this doesn’t even necessarily happen consciously, but when we look back over the entire family cycle, we can often see that that’s the point where things got moving.

Then, the Full Moon in this cycle. It’s on November 5th, 2025, at 13º 22’ Taurus, and that’s often when it becomes very clear what actually was happening at this month’s New Moon.

The Last Quarter in this cycle comes on August 5th, 2026. It falls at 13º 40’ Taurus, and that is generally a moment where we have one more opportunity to act, and usually, it is to help us frame, or bring to conclusion, the matter that was begun at this New Moon.

I’m loving these lunar phase family cycles, and I’m excited when people write and tell me that they are playing around with them, and they are seeing the continuity over the three-year period. I hope that you will experiment with this as well.

Void-of-Course Moon Periods

Let’s look at the Void-of-Course Moon periods for this week. The Moon is Void-of-Course after it makes the final major aspect in its sign, for the period of time until it moves into the next sign. And this amount of time varies. So sometimes we have very, very short Void-of-Course Moon periods. Last week we had one that was less than a minute in length! And sometimes we’ll get them that are 19 hours. But the way to work with Void-of-Course Moon periods is to examine our habits and to decide if we are in a rut, if we are in habits that aren’t really getting us where we want to go, and how we can initiate new and healthy habits.

The first Void-of-Course period for this week begins on May 8th when the Moon in Taurus sextiles Neptune in Pisces at 2:55 pm Pacific Time. It’s then Void-of-Course for about an hour and a half, and then enters Gemini at 4:20 pm. Sextile aspects bring an opportunity, so Void-of-Course Moon periods that begin with the Moon in sextile to another planet does give us an invitation.

This one is about getting our daily affairs in order. The Moon always represents the daily routine. And when it’s in Taurus, there is an impulse to get the practical, everyday matters in order. And if we do that, then we will have the time to really indulge in the work of Neptune, relaxation, daydreaming, enjoying music, fiction, movies, pampering ourselves. If you have everything taken care of with your work, your responsibilities to others, running errands, paying bills, all of that, then you can really relax and enjoy Neptune’s realm with a clear conscience.

And on May 10th, the Moon in Gemini squares Neptune at 6:49 pm Pacific Time. It’s Void-of-Course for about nine and a half hours and then enters Cancer at 8:13 pm. Void-of-Course Moons that begin in a square aspect to another planet represent a conflict that needs to be, not necessarily resolved, but certainly addressed. And in this case, it’s the conflict between the Moon in Gemini, which can be too busy to explore the quieter world of the mind and soul that are represented by Neptune.

This is a time to resist the urge to think your feelings instead of feeling them. And since the Moon is in Gemini, and that’s a sign that really loves to write and express itself, I would suggest doing some journaling that gets to the heart of what’s really going on inside of you. The Moon, when it’s in air signs, Gemini, Libra, or Aquarius, doesn’t always want to have deep heart-to-heart talks with another person; but certainly, you can share your feelings on a blank page and then it’s only yourself that is looking at it and getting a chance to think about it.

Sun sextile Saturn (May 6, 2024, 10:42 pm PDT)

The week’s only major aspect is on May 6th at 10:42 pm Pacific Time when the Sun in Taurus makes a sextile to Saturn in Pisces. The cycle of the Sun and Saturn focuses on increasing our self-discipline and making us the strongest and most responsible version of ourselves. If they meet in a conjunction, a square, or an opposition, we get a challenge to overcome and if we overcome it, we can feel stronger. Flowing aspects like this one, the sextile, offer opportunities to enjoy a feeling of greater self-respect and authority and the sense of being the author of your own life.

This is the opening sextile in the cycle that began on February 28th, 2024, when the Sun came together in a conjunction with Saturn in Pisces. I think that conjunction may have left a lot of us feeling that we really needed to get our act together, but it was really hazy to figure out how to approach doing that.

But now the Sun is in Taurus, and that symbolizes having found some stability over the last couple of months. So that now we have this opportunity to pursue dreams that may seem impractical, because that’s the way of anything in Pisces, even if it’s Saturn, but have the chance to succeed if we plan carefully and sensibly.

The Sabian symbol for the Sun at the sextile is, A woman holding a bag out of a window. And I always imagine she’s emptying trash or dust from a vacuum. She’s getting rid of debris. And once we do that, we can move forward a lot more lightly. The symbol for Saturn is A gigantic tent and I imagine a circus tent or a religious revival tent.

Either one is a space for performing something that can in some way seem magical or transcendent. So this is the sextile that invites us to look back to late February of this year at that Sun-Saturn conjunction and think about what we may have been dreaming of. What our fondest hopes might have been at that time – and now we have an opportunity to begin to make them real. It won’t happen overnight, and this entire cycle takes about a year to complete. But we do have the chance to make a beginning because the Sun in Taurus provides us with the stability to have a strong platform to plan from.

Listener Question: Progressed Lunar Phases

In this week’s listener question, listener Bethany asks, “Hi April, I wonder if you would talk about the lunar phases in the progressed chart. I just entered my progressed New Moon phase and I just don’t feel as energetic and optimistic as I’d hoped I would.”

Well, Bethany, thank you for that question. Secondary progressions are a technique that are really one of my favorites because they really reveal what’s going on on the inside. And transits – which I talk about every week on the podcast, of course – tend to represent the outer forces that are coming at us, but the secondary progressed chart gives us some insight into how we’re processing that on an internal level.

First, for people who are not familiar with secondary progressions, I’ll just explain them very simply. They’re based on the movement of the transiting planets in the days after your birth. But each day after your birth represents a year of your life. So if we looked in the ephemeris and we started at your birthday, and then we look at the next day in the ephemeris, the placement of the planets on that day are the secondary progressed placements, more or less, on your first birthday. And they really describe something about your first year of life.

Now, why this should be the case? I don’t know. I’ve never heard anyone really explain why it does work, but I find it a really insightful system.

In the progressed chart, the planet that shows by far the most movement is the Moon. Because if you just look at an ephemeris and you look from one day to the next, on most days, not a lot of things are changing very quickly, except the Moon, because the Moon moves between 11 and 13 º each day, whereas the Sun moves a little less than one degree and Venus a little less than one degree and so forth.

For that reason, I consider this a very lunar system. The transiting lunar cycle takes about 29.5 days to complete. And that means the progressed lunar cycle takes 29.5 years. Which happens to also mimic the cycle of transiting Saturn, which takes 29 years. I like this kind of synastry between the Moon representing the most intimate, day-to-day facets of our personal development, versus Saturn, which represents the boundaries of the outside world. So this progressed lunar cycle repeats about every 29 years, and not too far from the transiting Saturn return

The progressed lunar phase is of course, the relationship between the progressed Sun, which moves about a degree per year, and the progressed Moon, which moves a degree per month, and slowly they unfold in a full lunar cycle in the secondary progressed chart.

Each of these progressed phases lasts about three and a half years. You get a progressed lunar return – meaning, the Progressed Moon comes back to the natal position – every 27 years, and you get a Progressed Lunar Phase return about every 29 and a half years. This means the lunar phase at your birth, the exact angle between the Sun and Moon, repeats every 29.5 years. If you were born at the Crescent Phase, for example, you’d have a progressed crescent phase around age 29.5.

The progressed New Moon happens when the Progressed Sun and the Progressed Moon are at the same degree of the same sign. I have a good friend who just entered her Progressed New Moon Phase about a year ago, and it hasn’t been a really wonderful time for her. She has sustained some loss. She lost some family members. She lost her dog. It’s like her whole life is kind of getting emptied out. And after three and a half years of the balsamic phase, which precedes this, she was really excited about this New Moon, and it just isn’t looking the way she hoped it would look.

And when I thought about it, that makes sense, because the same is true with the transiting New Moon. We can get very excited about this new beginning, but it’s actually a very dark time, and it’s a little bit of a hard time, it’s a little bit of a, I would say, a cold time. As much as we feel the excitement that maybe something new can begin, there’s also sitting first with the emptiness. Which, if you’ve done the balsamic lunar phase correctly, you’ve emptied everything out so that you can have a new beginning at the progressed New Moon.

But that doesn’t happen right away. What happens first is the emptiness. And then eventually, as you’re getting a little bit further on in this progressed phase and getting closer to the crescent phase, you might begin to see the light a little bit, some kind of inspiration of the new thing that’s coming.

But initially, the progressed New Moon can feel kind of hard. And it’s as Bethany said in her email, she just doesn’t feel quite as energetic and optimistic as she had hoped she would. And I find that at the transiting New Moon as well. But the point with the New Moon is to experience the emptiness of being in a new place symbolically and to just keep moving forward until the light returns again.

I’ll cover the other seven phases somewhat quickly, because really, I wanted to address Bethany’s question about the New Moon, but it’s fun to look at the whole cycle and see what that is showing us.

At the Crescent Moon, about three and a half years after the progressed New Moon, there is a shift in focus. And what happens is we start to really begin to see light. In a symbolic sense, because if you go outside on the night of a crescent Moon, you’ll see that beautiful little crescent up there after many nights of the sky being dark. So it represents an exciting symbol to kind of fixate on, and that’s the energy of the Crescent Moon, to find purpose and focus and determination. And it begins with noticing or being caught by something in your life that then begins to fascinate you.

The Crescent Moon is followed by the progressed First Quarter Moon, and as I say about this one in each week’s podcast when I talk about the lunar phase family, we know that the First Quarter and the Last Quarter are times of action. And the First Quarter in this progressed lunar cycle represents the time of action, and we still don’t know everything, we don’t know exactly where we’re headed or how things are going to turn out, but we act on faith, and we act on something that fascinated us at that crescent Moon.

After the First Quarter Moon, there is the waxing gibbous phase. That’s when the Moon looks almost full, but it isn’t, and we really have to bear that in mind, that although we may feel really like we know exactly what we’re doing, some of our ideas at the waxing gibbous can end up a little bit half baked. So this is a three-and-a-half-year phase in the secondary progressions, and what we can learn from it is to keep up our momentum, to detach from the need to be perfect, and to practice devotion and service and resilience.

Then comes the progressed Full Moon. This can be a really important phase in the secondary cycle for relationship. And it’s when the progressed Sun and the progressed Moon are opposite each other, same degree, opposite signs. It is a very illuminating phase. It’s when we’re to take an honest look at ourselves and where we are, to ask for feedback from the people we love, from the people we work with. And what we can learn during this phase is to learn to behold the bounty of our lives, to appreciate what we have, to connect with other people and to be fully present.

Following the Full Moon is three and a half years of the waning Gibbous cycle, which we also call the Disseminating Moon in astrology. This is the time for sharing our experiences and our stories to teach other people to write letters. This can be a cycle when you travel quite a lot. And it’s a great cycle if you’re a writer or any kind of storyteller, especially.

The Last Quarter Moon follows the Disseminating Moon and this is the other action time in the progressed lunar cycle, but this time we’re acting based on past experience and what we already have seen and what we know.

The Last Quarter Moon’s a little bit tough because we also can look back and maybe have regrets about what we didn’t do or what we haven’t done quite the way we had wished. But at this progressed phase, it’s a really excellent time to refine your work up to now. If up to now in this cycle you have done any kind of work, especially creative work, Get it all organized, make your refinements to it, while still knowing that you can’t just throw it all out and start over. That’s for the next New Moon cycle. What you’re doing now is doing the best with what you’ve done. And it is a time of changing attitude and perspective because that’s one thing you really can change.

And then, that is followed by the balsamic or waning crescent cycle. That’s three and a half years of releasing and letting go, disengaging from the cycle that you’ve been in, so that at the next progressed New Moon, you are at that quiet, empty place, and you’re ready to start an entire new 29-year adventure.

Bethany, I hope that helps, and I hope it gives you heart a little bit about this New Moon phase, which may feel a little disappointing to you right now. But know that if you’re feeling a little less energetic, a little less optimistic, you’re probably exactly where you should be, where the New Moon is concerned.

Now if you, Invisible Friend, have a question you’d like me to answer on a future episode, leave a message of one minute or less at Speakpipe.com/bigskyastrologypodcast. Or, email me at April (at) BigSkyAstrology.com and put “Podcast Question” in the subject line.

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