New Moon in Taurus: Rage, Exile and Bimbofication
I consider the New Moon in Taurus' ambiguous entanglement with the scorned femme, Black Moon Lilith, and how this is all playing out in the news and pop culture.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops - at all -”
- Emily Dickinson
The New Moon in Taurus (the last before the upcoming eclipse series) presents us with something of a paradox: the exalted Moon wants us to sink our weary feet in a bed of moss and soily water. The Moon’s cool and flowing nature finds an ideal bower in the fecundity and loam of Taurus.
A raft of helpful and productive aspects (the new Moon sextile Neptune, and Mercury trine Saturn) further provide a sturdy place for our most audacious post-pandemic dreams to land. Given time. We can use these next two weeks for rooting, planning and consolidating our resources, before the eclipse squalls to come.
However, this is also a Moon swallowed by Lilith’s latex-black scrying mirror. Lilith, the scorned femme, and first wife of Adam—who refused to lie beneath him—is of the earth, but not in a way that’s particularly Venusian or dimpled or voluptuous.
She is, perhaps, the complete void of affect that Werner Herzog meditates on in Grizzly Man, his camera in an unflinching close up of a bear’s face, in which he sees only ‘chaos’: “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”
There’s a wildness to Lilith that transcends the more tangible pleasures of Taurean bluebell strewn meadows, and spring-lacquered leaves. To my mind, she’s connected to invisible, even quantum realms: the scorned mistress of vibrational fields, leylines, forays into the astral plane, and the eroticism that arises from absence, and emptiness. Or, to quote Anne Carson, “in the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive.”
Lilith is, after all, a mathematical point in space: the apogee of the Moon, and a vector of ‘empty focus’. The astronomical concept of apogee refers to the furthest possible point that a celestial object, like the Moon, pulls away from the earth in its orbit. Putting aside her mythological underpinnings as the exiled, and recalcitrant first wife of Adam, I think that apogee beautifully explains her association with all rejected and reviled forms of femininity. There’s something of an oedipal struggle here: Lilith sees the Moon straining as far from gaia as possible, besotted more by the cold math of stars than earth’s more sensual pleasures.
I can’t help but wonder about Lilith’s hand in recent groundbreaking discoveries in quantum mechanics, (which may upend the standard model and open a portal to further mysteries), centering on the ‘moun’ particle:
“It’s an exciting time in particle physics. The results of a new experiment out of Fermilab in Illinois — involving a subatomic particle wobbling weirdly — could lead to new ways of understanding our universe… “One of the big reasons why we know it’s incomplete is because of gravity. We know it exists because apples fall from trees and I’m not floating off my seat,” Esquivel says. But they haven’t yet found a fundamental particle that conveys gravity’s force, so it’s not in the standard model.
Esquivel says the model also doesn’t explain two of the biggest mysteries in the universe: dark matter, an elusive substance that holds galaxies together, and dark energy, an even more poorly understood force that is accelerating the universe’s expansion. And since the overwhelming majority of the universe might be made up of dark matter and dark energy, that’s a pretty big oversight.”
It’s my pet theory that Lilith’s transit through Aries, entangled as she was with the wounded healer Chiron (on a much longer mission in the sign of the warrior), has seen her weird alien torque acting on the blood itself: Covid 19 is understood now as a multi-system vascular disease, which is why it can wreak havoc on all of the organs. The mysteries of covid will continue to reverberate through generations to come, and this is a disease I have taken very seriously.
Now Lilith turns her attention to the earth itself (and physics as we know it). Consort to Uranus’ ongoing mission to upend all systems of valuation—she adds her own feral rage to the mix. Uranus in Taurus is rekindling our relationship to earth spirits via the psilocybin revolution, and likely ushering in a post-pandemic emphasis on the local as opposed to the global. The tech-authored estrangement from the sensual world is part of this transit as well, and will hopefully swing wildly in the other direction (a la the Holy Shit Go Outside meme).
This is a transit that will potentially sow chaos in the form of natural disasters, ongoing wealth transfers, a continued exodus of the wealthy from cities to communes, and what feels like an inevitable post-pandemic depression because meme currencies are fake and dumb.
I suspect Lilith’s strange wobble can be seen in the crypto bubble right now, which feels more like chaotic accelerationism than an actual currency evolution. There’s a side to Lilith that will preemptively self-harm before the wounding can come from the outside, and there’s a dark-carnival-at-the-end-of-the-world vibe to Doge and the like, which feels like more of a fuck you to late capitalism than a permanent shift into a new market of memes, vibes, hype and para-social simping. Or, to quote Public Enemy, “fuck the game if it ain’t got nothing.”
This lunation opens the way for Jupiter’s ingress into his watery domicile, as well as eclipse season, and will initiate us into the ambiguities of Lilith interfacing through the tactile lens of Taurus. In the endless dance of repulsion and attraction, Lilith’s turning her cheek on the ultimate ‘smother mother’ sees the maternal qualities we associate with the Moon shattered into smithereens of femininity that can play out with an aura of dissociation, contempt, or a redemptive detachment.
I see Lilith’s fierce renewal via Aries, (and further rooting herself in the material world via Taurus) in the resurgence of the Bimbo meme and its offshoots (himbos, thembos, bimboys, cyborgs, clowns, etc). Gen Z has reclaimed the Bimbo, and the process of Bimbofication generally, as a critique, I believe, of the violent interpellations, and subject-making pressures of late capitalism.
The hyper-feminine accouterments, body mods, expensive hair and lash treatments (and the sheer time it takes to create the look!) could be seen as a Lilithian rejection of presenting as viable capitalist subjects. Instead of pouring energy into the punishing gig economy, time is lavished on a slavish, almost masochistic upkeep of a feminine vessel—verging on a sheathing—so grotesque, plasticized, and indeed, alien that it repels the endless gaze of our surveillance state.
Billie Eilish, (arguably the pop star du jour) is very much a Lilithian figure (Lilith conjunct her Pisces AC). and recently ‘revealed’ her body in a decidedly Bimbo-esque shoot for Vogue Magazine. Her Marilyn Monroe styling via corsets that verged on body-con, or medical-grade hosery, was just a further concealing of her body, rather than some ‘grand reveal’ gamed to break the internet.
There was a sort of sausaged, and packed in quality to the lingerie that left an unsettling, rather than titillating impact. With Lilith, I get the feeling of an unstable ‘feminine’ ectoplasm that can only be revealed through its absence or exaggeration: whether poured into stiff, hour-glass corsets, or completely obscured by the baggy mall rat clothes she normally favors, the “cosmic sex meat” of it all remains a mystery. Additionally, the text below: “it’s all about what makes you feel good,” feels deliberately banal and bimbofied—Lilith as the screen onto which so much is endlessly projected, while behind it there’s only wind, starlight, and careening quantum particles.
An earlier staged ‘revealing’ of Eilish’s body echoed the film Under the Skin (spoiler alert!), in which an alien seduces men in the hinterlands of Glasgow as a means of harvesting food for a distant alien colony. At the moment of her disrobing the men are swallowed by a mysterious pool of oil, essentially dissolved into the void of Lilith’s rage at ‘being seen’—consumed and cannibalized by their own desire for a projected chimera.
The entity is larping as Scarlett Johansson, by the way: stiltedly performing the algorithm of a bombshell in a cheap wig and red lipstick. This is perhaps the closest a work of art has come to revealing the mysteries of Lilith’s sinuous dance of attraction and repulsion, and how femininity is worn like a skin, or projected as a patina quite dislocated from Lilith herself.
Returning to this paradoxical New Moon, I see struggles over land, material resources, and our rightful connection to the earth triggering Lilith’s outright rejection of it all, and scorched earth policy. The cyborgian bimbo retreats further into dreams of a technological singularity that will free her from earthly concerns at last. However, this is a powerful moment too for intrepid innovation (Mars sextile Uranus), prudent planning and strategizing (Mercury trine Saturn), and a seeding of our wildest dreams (La Luna sextile Neptune).
I think the key to this new moon will be negotiating our wild sovereignty (and desire to flee far away from our symbolic mommies and daddies) within the limits of our contracted material circumstances. Many of us are still planted in the same tract of land by ongoing covid restrictions, even as an acceleration of the vaccine roll out is giving us a tantalizing glimpse of the post-pandemic world. Trust me, I’m finding it harder and harder to still glimpse the fairies on my 1000th walk along Mark fucking Creek, but I continue this daily meditation all the same.
Already, folks in the USA and the UK are tasting the bacchanal of Jupiter in home turf of Pisces (prison-break from Saturn at last!). A friend sent a recent video of Catalans dancing and singing in one of my favorite Gracia squares, where I used to relax with a vermut after a flick at the Cine Verdi. Torture! For many of us, the wait continues... impossibly.
Lilith’s central wound of being maligned, misunderstood, and not really ‘seen’, could see her rejecting ‘the game’ altogether (trust in Canadian leadership is at an all time low here, understandably). Or the wound is deflected in a venomous othering of those around her. May I interest you in some Alberta covid rodeos?
The internet is feeling particularly gross these days in tribal scape-goating, and threatened exile, if you do not sing the party line. Checks ins will be necessary in the weeks ahead as to whether our reactions are aligned, or rooted in something shameful we’ve rejected and psychically amputated in ourselves. Time spent in nature communing with the lilacs, horse tails and jeweled new leaves is not a luxury right now, but a need.
I have my eye on the events surrounding the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates, as I suspect the latter may be driving proceedings, and going ‘off piste’ in an unpredictable Lilithian way. It has surfaced that her concerns around Bill Gates’ friendship with Jeffrey Epstein triggered the divorce, and I have a feeling this is anything but a conscious uncoupling. This new moon could see solar figures, who have been acting with unchecked Icarus-level hubris (Bill Gates literally has plans to block out the sun), shockingly dethroned by a rogue Lilith with nothing to lose. Didn’t Grimes have a panic attack after SNL?
The horrifying resurgence of Israeli state-sanctioned, (and US-funded), mass slaughter of Palestinians (including 16 children), is steeped in the archetype of Lilith. The maligned and fragmented body of Lilith finds a disturbing echo in the dismemberment of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Lilith holds providence over all those who are dispossessed and have been amputated from sovereignty over their bodies, or refused their right to self-determination and simple survival.
Reflecting the horrors of murderous settler colonialism, and the bodies of covid patients that continue to wash up in The Ganges, the New Moon opens its portal in a sometimes brutal decan of Taurus (ruled by Saturn) that Austin Coppock calls "Fallen to Earth":
“The third face of Taurus is the most ominous one of the three, for here thunder and flood threaten well-laid plans and virtuous labor. Not only that, but raw power of creation rises up against the hubris of any tiny human portion.
Yet there are prayers which even the savage titans hear, and sacrifices they do accept. The sacrifice of Pride is one. Even as you recall the infinite quality of your divine origin, remember too that the vessel you reside in is small and weak before the might of a mountain. The Titans, having fallen from grace and power, not only teach humility — they are themselves a lesson in it… The volcano does not explode for or against you. The Titans do not care about you. History does not care about you. But nor does it care to destroy you. You are not part of the calculation.”
And so we are swept into the fathoms deep of the collective unconscious, via Jupiter’s ingress into Pisces tomorrow (on Jupiter’s day), confronting the metaphorical Titans of billionaires hoarding vaccine patents while funeral pyres continue to burn in car parks in India. We also confront the banality of evil that is state-sponsored execution of civilians, as Israel vows to continue the attacks until there is “complete quiet.”
Via Lilith, we may confront a helpless rage, but we are also invited by the exalted Moon to tend to our own patches of land, cultivate our moss gardens, and supplicate ourselves to largely indifferent gods that perhaps can still be swayed by prayers and flattery. Now, more than ever, I think it’s crucial that we unplug, everyday, from our entanglement with the electrical hive mind. Rest and replenishment are crucial so we can support our pandemic battered friends and loved ones.
It’s easy to forget that we have been living 14 months of an unremitting collective trauma that has utterly uprooted our lives, and pierced our souls. Many in my cohort are grieving a version of reality, or relative state of innocence, that now recedes in the antique golds of Elysium.
Watching “Steal My Sunshine” by Len last night, I felt I was surveying some alien artifact: a lightness of being verging on the obscene. Jupiter is returning to his Piscean tide pool tomorrow, and I so want to believe that there will be urgent hands all over my body soon, and pagan revelry on the beaches of Barcelona this September for San Juan... but I still feel like Lilith, bristling and flinching away from the hope of human touch. Its been a long 14 months.
Let me know how you all are faring out there! xoxo