Full Moon in Libra: The Matrix is Broken and Horny

I explore the past weekend's heady full moon, as it intensifies Venus cazimi in Aries, via a very big, stuck ship and a tight canal.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus - Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I don’t know what else to say folks: the matrix is simultaneously broken and horny. It’s always interesting when a rather peculiar full moon signature manifests as a major news story. In this case, enter the Suez Canal blockage, which inspired its own fleet of horny memes, and reminded us (via Uranus in Taurus) that the flow of capital is still very much a physical thing with spatial realities and tensions.

I can’t help but see Evergreen’s spanner in the works as a re-balancing of the scales, as it were, after the recent hype surrounding NFTs, and a further descent into abstraction, incoherence and simulacrum. It’s like we’re being reminded that commerce is still rooted in an earthen context that’s ancient and increasingly fragile.

Anyway, what do the current planetary shenanigans (and tortured edging) have to do with the Suez Canal? Firstly, we have Venus just separating now from her cazimi—an auspicious moment of rebirth for all matters pertaining to the goddess of love. The Full Moon further intensified this birthing of Venus into her more assertive morning star phase (ever the more ardent in Aries who relishes the hunt).

This moment of alchemical disintegration, however, is also happening in the sign of her fall—a rather sharp tumble from grace after weeks of VIP charioteering in Pisces. Or an enormous ship, with its Venusian bounty, literally sinking into silt and grinding to a halt. There are jokes to be made about Venus, in Mars’s sign, suffering the effects of that dry heat, and perhaps needing some extra help to ameliorate matters.

In any case, when she was exalted in Pisces she was protected from the worst of the Sun’s combustion. In horary astrology, Venus can represent wealth and material goods. What was held aloft suddenly fell into the heart of a dazzling, exalted Aries sun. I wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of extreme weather situation (perhaps a sand storm?) ends up being the cause of the ship running aground.

Furthermore, if we look to Venus’ ruler Mars, we see that the warrior has just separated from a conjunction with the North Node in Gemini (Egypt is a Gemini country as well). A fateful severing was interfacing through a sign related to commerce, and even Gemini’s ruler is now in its fall in Pisces. Meanwhile, an exalted Sun was given free range to desiccate this water-bound flow of capital. Except with Gemini we can expect some strange splitting and mirroring, and indeed photos surfaced of an Evergreen truck blocking a major highway in China around the same time!

Interestingly, the full moon was what seemed to finally free the ship, as strong tides apparently dislodged it after days of painstaking digging. Here we have another literal manifestation of the Full Moon’s ability to finesse flow states.  

At the height of the Suez memeing, however, I was struck by what may be a Libran preoccupation: the cold aesthetic pleasure we experience when witnessing vast differences in scale. Perhaps the photo most generously memed image was that of the massive Evergreen Ship drawfing the daintiest scoop shovel that was TRYING ITS BEST.  

A classic meme format of course, but it echoed a larger theme this year of structural monoliths, (and the invisible workings of capital itself), being infiltrated and rendered uncanny: Capitol Hill, Wall Street, and now the Suez Canal. I wonder if these vertiginous swings in and out of the human and the monolithic scale are preparing us for the further fragmenting of complex global systems into a sort of techno-feudalism.

Ramon Blecua describes our bifurcating reality as a rising medievalism (and note the nodal dance that runs through this quote of Sag’s collapsing mythic coherence giving way to Gemini’s plurality and social pixilation):

“The philosopher Dariush Shayegan identifies three phenomena that define our chaotic contemporary world: the loss of existence’s magical dimensions, the destruction of reason, and the replacement of imagination with audio-visual virtual reality. These phenomena are characterised by the destruction of all ontologies and the interconnectivity of all the spheres of reality, the generalisation of multiple identities and the simultaneity of different states of consciousness. The re-emergence of social and economic interactions, that echo the medieval system of fragmented authorities and multi-layered loyalties, may create new relationships of dependence in which Big Tech corporations and financial conglomerates take on the mantle of the feudal overlords.”

The first decan of Libra also echoes a threshold moment of weighing and discrimination, by the Eqyptian God Ma’at no less, as described by Austin Coppock (and it’s hard not to extrapolate this symbolic weighing of the Evergreen ship, against the miniscule diggers, as a karmic reckoning of late capitalism itself):

“The scales pictured here are thus for both commerce and justice. It is therefore difficult not to imagine the figure of Ma’at, the Egyptian goddess of justice who weighed the hearts of the recently deceased against a feather. Yet Ma’at was not merely the officiant of this terrifying rite, she was the embodiment of good order through right relationship, the embodiment of a cosmological and ethical principle…Maat emerges from the underworld in this face, scales in her hand. The terrible Erinyes follow behind, but so does Peace, for she is the sister of Justice. This decan drags transgressors to court, and weighs the trade of both merchants and lovers. There is no interaction not weighed by Maat, for the judgment of the Heart is ongoing.”  

Excerpt from the ‘Book of the Dead’, showing the “Weighing of the Heart” using the feather of Maat as the measure for the counter-balance. Created by an unknown artist C.1300 BC 

This full moon—ripening under the providence of Venus—may have brought relationships to a similar crisis point, necessitating judgment, discretion, and the weighing of options. Perhaps a sudden, subtle shift in the wind threw an entire relational dynamic out of balance (I mean, Mars is bound to bring horniness but also a severing of elaborate Neptunian projections).

With the Moon opposing Venus, there may be iterations of the Madonna-whore complex too, or role-reversals in the maiden and mother archetypes. Perhaps there’s tension (or chirotic insecurity) that arises from coveting the maiden energy in a new lover, when the panini has left you feeling like a crone at 33.

Venus may be dazzled by said new lover (who has the upper hand through dignity), but she’s something of an enigma herself right now too. Still in a state of invisibility, and shape-shifting out of her cazimi, her molten gold keeps slipping through the Sun’s fingers.

There’s an edgy, tantalizing energy at play today that’s probably best channeled into sex. Chiron’s shrapnel shifting in the heart may bring further attraction and repulsion, as we may find ourselves suddenly more concerned with protecting a hard-earned equilibrium (until he sends you *that* picture and you’re in horny jail again).

After early March’s mirage of Dionysian intoxication, (via Neptune and exalted Venus), there may be a need now for paucity, and detachment, as we remember that it may be prudent to protect our hearts. There is wisdom in knowing the difference between the fantasy that fuels eros, and that which leads us to possible delusion and deception as Mercury prepares to conjoin Neptune tomorrow.

The Sabian symbol for this entanglement of the Sun, Venus, and Chiron is that of a woman’s hat with streamers tossed by the wind. If we continue to play with fire, at least some practical head-wear? We still feel magnetically attracted to the jouissance of that exalted Aries Sun—secretly turned on by its frankness and cosmic entitlement. Nevertheless, we find subtle ways to wear our defenses as aesthetic embellishment: the blithe, zaniness of the exclamation mark undercutting our vulnerability (seriously cannot end a text these days without ‘!’ or lol, because sincerity is terrifying right now).

Venus in Aries can be an impertinent little trollop, which is where she might find her upper hand with the exalted Sun. I’m reminded of this scene in screwball comedy His Girl Friday, especially with Venus’ ruler in rapid-fire Gemini (and it’s a movie of increasingly improbable hats).   

Finally, the rules of erotic engagement and rituals of decorum (Saturn is exalted in Libra after all) may offer a holding vessel for what feels like a potentially destructive conflagration of passion and desire. Except the break down is the point as Venus submits to her rebirth. A white hot new relationship could very well be transitional--the wild fire needed to clear the heart of what feels like centuries of brush and old growth.

Meanwhile, the sexual frustration of transiting Saturn opposite my natal Mars peaks today. Send help, lol.