Eclipse Season's Fate Accelerator
I explore eclipse portal and its lore through my own emblematic South Node experience and the ongoing escalation of the crisis in the Middle East.
In Jane Alison’s book on the craft of writing, Meander, Spiral, Explode, she looks to recurring patterns in nature as a way to imagine beyond the Aristotelian narrative arc. Beginning, middle, and end: the wave function. Further codified as the narrative form par excellence in Freytag’s narrative triangle or pyramid. The crash and suck of waves on a shore, “elegant and satisfying”, is one such pattern we’re hardwired to respond to. Not unlike the heartbeat, the iamb, the breath itself. But Alison poses the question: why not imagine other shapes?
“For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?”
On the spiral, she writes: “think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a nautilus.” As a narrative structure it “begins at a point and moves onward, not extravagant or lackadaisical like a meander, but smooth and steady, spinning around and around that central point or a single axis.” Or a single, echoing trauma.
Within the crescendo of eclipse season, this idea of the spiral narrative feels apt. Not only for this eclipse in general but for the way eclipse stories seem to unravel generally. Circuitously and often without resolution. A ricocheting in and out from a central trauma. An inexorable desire to return to the scene of the grievous incident with the hope — often naive — that repeating the trauma can somehow rewrite it. During eclipse season’s bardo we are duendics, loving the edge: “the rim of the wound.”
This particular eclipse season feels especially labyrinthine, as we crossfade between the closing Aries-Libra series and experience the first tremors of Pisces-Virgo. A dragon, slumbered for 18 years, is stirring once more. Of course, when we speak of a “new eclipse story” unraveling, it’s perhaps more useful to consider its events as an iteration or modification of a much deeper theme. Another thread is slipped into the rug motif whose end and beginning are often inscrutable.
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My experience of the South Node eclipse in Libra — as part of my ongoing nodal return — today has been all too uncanny. For the past few years, a storage locker in Barcelona has held several garbage bags and old suitcases of my clothes, trinkets, books, and even the hard copy of my PhD thesis. I know this probably sounds unhinged, but when I was briefly sojourning in Barcelona last summer, I just didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with the locker. Partly, I was still digital nomading and didn’t yet have a permanent address. But meeting my ex and his girlfriend and hugging my elderly cat again after four years all but exhausted my emotional resources.
The way I left Spain was of course very strange: a three month visit of friends and family in Canada in December of 2019 became a long and ambiguous pandemic breakup. At some point in late 2020 my possessions were bundled up by a moving company and transferred to the locker, which I’ve been sharing with my ex’s son and his girlfriend. Notwithstanding the money I wasted on this long, drawn out cycle of emotional avoidance, the locker has felt like some metaphysical grotto, where a satellite fragment of my spirit was still trapped in Barcelona. Speaking of eclipse season’s hungry ghosts.
The issue was finally forced this week. The couple I share storage with reached out with the news that they were finally giving up the locker. Bearing the cost alone made absolutely no sense so I decided it was finally time to let this time-capsule of my life in Spain go the way of the South Node. And of course it would be the day before the Solar Eclipse in Libra that I finally sloughed away years of energetic deadweight.
I video called Amanda, while she was in the locker yesterday, and decided which of the items to donate, turf, and ship back to Canada. I was ruthless in the dispatching of these darlings. In the end, what I decided to keep would fit in a cardboard box. I felt completely disconnected from the piles of vintage frocks I collected when I was in my twee millennial hipster arc. A mink stole I did still cherish was improperly stored and was rotting. So much polyester; I cringe. Perhaps, like my Doukhobor ancestors, I’ve reached the part where the symbolic farm house is burned down, every 15 years, as a protest of materialism. Nothing really felt like my current style, in any case, so I decided to just donate it all. A handful of sentimental objects, an old passport, my thesis, and a book of Russian Fairy Tales, were all that made it to the box. Such is the South Node tendency to whittle things down to their essential, gleaming, pith.
That very same day, as these things go in the eclipse portal, my boyfriend and I were given the keys to our new home in Montreal (we actually made the move a month ago and have been staying in an air bib in Little Italy). The townhouse is bright, airy, and exquisitely quiet. It’s close to Park Jarry, where I’ve taken up running again. Within the eclipse portal, timelines seem to collapse in on themselves. Or perhaps we’re able to perceive, fleetingly, how time’s scaffolding is of course fake. The pomegranate stitched veil billows open.
It’s during an eclipse that Luna’s rhythmic, undulating wave pattern — her monthly, whittling and regeneration — is perceived in real time. Just as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth briefly align, in this rare cross-section of history when perfect eclipses are even possible, it suddenly strikes us that the Moon’s sickle was always holding its darkness in its own white arms. It’s one of those cliches — water rushing to fill the path of a child’s dragged stick in the mud — that is nonetheless deeply profound when we experience it in real time. On one half of the spinning coin, bags of my own moth-chewed clothes piled on the donation point in Barcelona; and on the other side, the man from Stavanger smoothing a white linen cloth over the dining room table of our new home.
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I’ve heard eclipses described as cosmic redistributions of power. Or as fate accelerators. Bernadette Brady’s studies into ancient beliefs about eclipses, from the Assyrians to the Egyptians to the Mesopotamians, is a useful frame, I think, as eclipses continue to send their shockwaves through the Middle East. She explains that going all the way back to Ancient Mesopotamia and their beliefs around eclipses, the Sun was absolutely connected to the King, and thus to the state.
Though the Sun and Moon are often referred to as the luminaries — the King and Queen of the heavens respectively — for the Mesopotamians the Moon was likened to a divine force. A sort of God. As the mediator between Earth, the Sun, and the Sun-king’s court, every Full or New Moon was seen as an opportunity to make an offering to the Moon: and to forces of divinity beyond the affairs of humans themselves.
A Full Moon, not obscured by cloud cover, would be seen as this God receiving the gift of the Sun, aka the king, graciously. But a solar eclipse, when the Moon actually blocks the Sun, was regarded by the Mesopotamians as an ominous rejection of this gift of light. We speak about eclipses as having momentous implications for whole groups of people and nations and this is explained by this more ancient conception of the Sun as the king with the divine mandate. As an eclipse’s shadow swallows Sol, darkness can fall on entire empires or dynasties. And of course within this uncanny interruption of the cosmic order, the king’s enemies may choose to make moves under the cover of this celestial darkness — within this strange lacuna of frozen time that we call eclipse season.
Solar eclipses were linked more explicitly to potential dangers to the King. This would lead to practices such as the substitute King ritual I’ve mentioned before, when the actual sovereign was hidden in a cave and cloistered by protective rituals over the course of the eclipse (and a window of time on either side). The King was replaced by a duplicate whose job it was to raw dog those baleful rays and then be executed after for his service, along with his substitute queen (a horrifically raw deal).
I mention all of this in light of the past eclipse in Pisces and its coincidence with the pager/walkie attack in Lebanon, when thousands of devices simultaneously exploded, killing at least 32 people, including 2 children. The Mesopotamians still regarded lunar eclipses as ominous but connected them more to calamities befalling the King’s enemies. The attack, which likely involved elaborate manufacturing sabotage, has been described as years in the making and part of a multi-pronged effort by Israel over the past decade to develop what Israeli officials referred to as a “red button” capability — meaning a potentially devastating penetration of an adversary that can remain dormant for months if not years before being activated.
If you are going to fuck with eclipse chaos magic and unleash its baleful rays through innumerable communication devices, an eclipse ruled by Jupiter in Gemini is pretty on the nose, as a sign connected to tech and the hands themselves. And it begs the question as to whether sabotage of tech or cyber attacks will continue to be a part of this eclipse series. The covert nature of the attack, with sleeper bombs hidden in the pockets of Hezbollah (and scores of innocent civilians too) describes the invisibility of eclipses and their tendency to obscure even what’s right before our eyes. On a sickeningly literal level, the attack was designed to maim, disfigure, and even blind its victims, rather than kill them outright. This eclipse, sandwiched between both Neptune and Saturn in Pisces, acted as an intensifier of these weighty Piscean themes, a co-presence that amps up persecution complexes as well as deluded retribution in the name of whatever God.
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If we go back all the way to 2006, when we last experienced North Node eclipses in Pisces and South node eclipses in Virgo, war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, as a result cross-border attack by Hezbollah fighters that culminated with the kidnapping of a pair of Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others. During this time period eclipses were also transitioning between Pisces/Virgo and Aries/Libra, just as we’re experiencing now.
What’s even more stunning, from an astrological perspective, is that on the very day of the solar south node eclipse in Virgo, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah (who was recently killed in an Israeli airstrike), marked what he called the group's "divine" victory over Israel with a vow never to surrender its weapons. In a defiant speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in a bombed suburb of southern Beirut (which is being bombarded once more), Nasrallah said there was "no army in the world" that could disarm Hezbollah by force. He also said his group would not release the two Israeli soldiers whose capture prompted the Israeli assault in the first place. It’s worth noting that Nasrallah was born when the nodal axis was in Pisces and Virgo.
Netanyahu, born on a Libra eclipse himself, his South Node conjunct Neptune, seems to be playing the part of deluded Sun King. As many astrologers have noted, October 7th occurred the night before the total solar eclipse in Aries last year. This eclipse was just a couple degrees off Netanhayu’s own North Node in Aries, an irrepressible hunger for war and bloodshed — writ large. Indeed, his rapacious and genocidal campaign of violence continues to be unleashed, seemingly without impunity, funded by the world’s strongest military power.
Harris/Biden continue to signal their indefatigable support for Israel, while Trump and the GOP can only needle the democrats for not supporting Israel aggressively enough. Such is an election season sponsored by Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, as the partisan myth of goodies and baddies dissolves into a morass of disillusionment and demoralization. Do you want your military industrial complex with the Libran airbrushing and blurring feature, or without? Of course, the true American stakes for this election are the reproductive rights of women and I sincerely hope that the heart-numbing and seemingly endless genocide unfolding in Gaza will not distract Americans from this absolutely crucial fight. Still, the South Node in Libra piece of this feels eclipse series like the USA, via endless, circuitous appeasement, following Israel into the underworld and into a position of total moral bankruptcy. Sure, “nothing ever happens,” but the quiet erosion of soul death is a major part of this eclipse story and Saturn’s tenure in Pisces.
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This all brings to mind the Vedic beliefs around eclipses, which were considered as highly inauspicious moments. The nodes themselves, the two mathematical points where the orbit of the Moon intersects the ecliptic, were considered in Vedic astrology as symbolic shadow planets. The myth of Rahu and Ketu — the avatars for the North Node and South Node respectively — centers around the story of the churning of the ocean (the Samudra Manthan), in the time before creation. During this cosmic event, the gods and demons collaborated to obtain amrita, the nectar of immortality. Among the participants was a demon named Svarbhanu, who disguised himself as a god to taste the coveted nectar.
As Svarbhanu sipped the amrita, the Sun and Moon alerted Lord Vishnu, who then swiftly cut off the demon's head with his discus, causing the ambrosial elixir to slip through the demon before any satiation was possible. This act resulted in the formation of two distinct entities: the head, full of unfulfilled ambitions and insatiable hunger, became Rahu, and the body, void of material attachments, became Ketu. As they were now immortal, Lord Vishnu needed to find a starry niche for them in the heavens, so he placed them in two specific points in the sky: the North and South Node. By eclipsing, and symbolically swallowing, the Sun and Moon twice a year, Rahu and Ketu are able to sow confusion and exact revenge on their betrayers. However, this was a hollow victory, as the Moon and Sun always escape.
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It’s hard not to draw parallels with eclipse lore as major news headlines describe the “decapitation of Hezbollah”, as a result of the pager attack and the strikes that followed, which coincided with the first Pisces North Node eclipse in 18 years. Just as the eclipse portal represents a profound dislocation in our experience of the cosmic order itself, its void invites the unleashing of riptides of chaos and frantic pushes of conquest (or revenge). Within its uncanny “frozen time” lies opportunity, for better or for worse.
As horrifying as it is to witness a conflagration in the Middle East again, the timing is all too predictable. Of course Netanyahu would bait Iran, via its proxy war with Hezbollah, when America is all but consumed by the upcoming election season and J.D. Vance’s Jim-from-the-office nods to the camera. Not to mention this liminal moment when the USA is being ruled over by a lame duck president, who was all but jettisoned from his own party due to cognitive decline. Eclipses bring eerie power vacuums and the insatiable hunger to fill these vacated spaces. South Node eclipses, in particular, tend to bring massive releases. Videos of Palestinians watching the night sky filling with fire as some 200 Iranian missiles rained down on the iron dome, was a further reminder of the awe eclipses can conjure.
I obviously don’t have space here to do the complexity of the situation unfolding in the Middle East any sort of justice — a story that is, of course, extremely fluid in high eclipse style. The past eclipse seasons have been teaching me, however, just how uncannily they reflect inexorable historical cycles of violence, retribution, revenge, and pointless war. 41,595 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza by the IDF to date (a number that is likely massively under-estimated), as the death toll in Lebanon continues to rise. The nation of Israel itself emerged just days after a solar eclipse in Taurus during the chaos of the Nakba — the catastrophe — during which 15,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 750,000 violently displaced by Israel. Perhaps the most brutal lesson of eclipses is that it's the civilians who are indiscriminately crushed by the thrashing of beserked dragons, which certain deranged tyrants believe they can harness and ride into a state of immortality.
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Apart from the deeply ominous escalation of events in the Middle East, the death toll from hurricane Helene’s “biblical” destruction continues to rise, with more than 1 million without power and hundreds more still missing. I was also struck by P. Diddy being apprehended in New York on September 16th, on charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, just a day before the Pisces North Node eclipse.
Diddy was born when the North Node was in Pisces (re debauched pool parties) and the lunar eclipse came with degrees of that point of his chart. Even more striking was Venus conjoining Diddy’s nymph-chasing Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Libra — the ruler of his North Node. Though eclipses certainly have a tendency to unleash loss and destruction, they can mete out justice just as swiftly and unequivocally. Coinciding with this last stint of Pluto through Capricorn in our lifetimes, it feels like the fall out from Diddy’s open secret will catalyze a last bottoming out of Hollyweird as we know it. Open secrets are strangely the most shadowy (and eclipsey) of them all, as the rich and powerful cloister themselves in a tangled web of blackmail material and the intimacy of mutually assured destruction.
Rest today. Let your mind empty in a salt bath. Heed the gods and grieve what needs to be grieved. Remember that you do not have to “do anything” with these energies.
A wee eclipse poem to close by Emily Dickinson to close:
It sounded as if the Streets were running
And then - the Streets stood still -
Eclipse - was all we could see at the Window
And Awe - was all we could feel.
By and by - the boldest stole out of his Covert
To see if Time was there -
Nature was in an Opal Apron,
Mixing fresher Air.