The Pisces Lunar Eclipse

Big fish and immersive experiences

The Moon, your feeling heart.

The Sun, your shining, aspirational self.

The two Luminaries sit at the head of your inner council, guiding you through dark times and bright, showing you how to lead from head and heart, teaching you how to step into the light and how to navigate in the dark.

The Nodes mark out the meeting places of the Luminaries, and also show those places in your chart (your life) where the membrane is thin between worlds. The Nodes show the places where you choose a new path in life, because something new came in, or something old left you.

Twice a year the Luminaries come together at the Nodes and create a series of eclipses. During Eclipse Season, we move out of ordinary time, and into a magical and volatile time of possibility. Our dependable lights are darkened, you see things under a new, uncanny, but also inspiring light. This world and the otherworld can intermingle, you find yourself in sacred space. This experience can be breathtaking and inspiring, it can be disruptive and difficult, or just plain disorienting. You can face unexpected events or feelings that set you on a new path in life. You always come away from Eclipse Season changed, often subtly, sometimes dramatically.

Eclipses are hard work for predictive astrologers; they don’t play by the rules. Along with the usual predictive tools, I like to feel into the season as a whole, getting a sense of the narrative structure of our collective and individual experiences over the four to eight weeks of Eclipse Season. The primary framework for this story is simply which comes first? The Lunar or Solar Eclipse? This tells you how the changes of the season will come to you. Will you make outer changes based on an inner revelation? Or will outer circumstances require you to shift your inner world?

This season begins with a Full Moon Lunar Eclipse at 25º Pisces, so we begin with an inner revelation of a Piscean nature (read more about this eclipse below). Two weeks later, with the New Moon Solar Eclipse in Libra, events unfold in our relationships based on the realizations that came through with the Full Moon.

A slippery fish

Next week’s Lunar Eclipse in Pisces is a slippery fish, or a stream running free of its banks, or some story like that. Something fishy and watery and uncontrollable, some intrusion onto our dry land world from a watery place. While writing this, I took a break to eat lunch, and in the course of a mindless scroll happened upon a short video:

Three small children lined up on the bench of a little boat on a placid lake on a sunny day.

From one side of the boat the water erupts and a very large very white fish leaps over the boat, knocking the first child into the floor, slapping the second child wetly in the face, and sailing past the third child. Reactions ranged from hysterical sobbing to laughter to frozen awe.

Not saying this eclipse will be like getting slapped in the face with a wet fish, but, depending on your chart…

Another story that comes to mind is Jonah and the Whale. A few months ago I was engaged in deep research on esoteric Pisces and the meanings attached to those fishes in the sky. These stories of being swallowed, then regurgitated, by a fish kept coming up. Not only Jonah, but many other characters across cultures. This is a very common story, it seems. In fact, it is one of the most commonly recurring folktales or myths across cultures and time, globally¹: being swallowed by a fish, spending some contemplative time in that belly, then being painfully regurgitated and finding oneself to be someone else entirely, with a new faith and a new lease on life. The universality of this story is really not surprising, considering we all start out floating around in a watery belly.

This tale as told in the Qur’an² is on point for the upcoming eclipses. The prophet Yunus (Jonah) has fled his calling, and ended up on a stormy night sea. Lots are drawn to see who will abandon ship to save the others, and Yunus loses. He is swallowed by the great fish. On the beach after his ordeal, he finds that Allah has provided shade and nourishment for him in the form of a giant gourd vine. So ends his crisis of faith, and he returns to his calling.

The Nodes in your chart (and in the living sky) provide guidance on your path towards becoming your most authentic self (or following your “calling”). Eclipses mark times of crisis on that path, times when you may find yourself lost or beset by storms because you have tried to run away from your truth in some way. Think of the magical time between eclipses as a time between worlds, in the belly of the beast, from which you can emerge re-dedicated to your truth and ready to get on with life, no more running away.

In the tumult of change, with some drama erupting in your life that you realize you could have avoided, you may feel that you have drawn the short straw. In fact, the universe (or your higher self, or your god) is preparing nourishment and shelter for you, if only you would return to your truth and stop running.

A surge of emotional and spiritual awareness comes in on the Full Moon in Pisces. You’ll see and feel clearly the distance between your dreams and your reality, and you’ll see what you need to let go of in order to bring those dreams to reality. You might feel emotionally shaken, you may feel that it’s hard to live up to your values, your faith, or simply the enormity of your creative drive and desires. You may feel at sea, but clarity will come in with the New Moon. Your job for the next two weeks is to surrender to this gestational time, let the bigness of your emotions and desires swallow you up, and trust that your inner truth will become clear.

I’ll write more about the planetary particulars of the lunar eclipse soon, but for now, prepare for your night sea journey.

Both artworks are from a folio of Jami al-Tavarikh of Rashid al-Din c.1400, images are in the public domain.

1. You can see the world distribution of the fish story in a graphic here.

2. The story of Yunus in the Qur'an is from Sura 37:139-148