Today, 3/19/11, the Moon comes closest to Earth in 18 years, and, as soon as it gets dark, I am heading across the street to the park to witness the most giant Moon of my life time.
To be sure, I’ve witnessed enormous moons in Catskills during summers of 2004 – 2006. The Moon was not anywhere near its perigee at that time, so I have no idea what has caused that phenomena.
The last time the Moon was at its perigee was in 1993 – the year my eldest nephew was born. He has conjunction of the Sun, the Moon, Venus and Mercury in Cancer. Since the Moon rules Cancer, he has got a truly powerful Moon in his chart!
He is a very bright young man. He aced through the best specialized public schools in NYC and now is studying in Hunter on full scholarship.
Everyone I’ve met with Sun / Moon conjuction in Cancer has impressed me with their powerful mind. When I was teaching at Manhattan Astrology School, I came across a few students with this combination. Without fail, they all were the brightest students of mine. They seemed to soak up my teachings so immediately and fully, as if they’ve read my mind and soak up my experience in addition to my spoken words.
Both, Cancer and Moon are ruled by water, which certainly adds psychic sensitivity to these people.
But Pisces, ruled by Neptune, is by far the most psychic of all zodiac signs. Yet my Pisces students and students with the Moon and / or ascendant in Pisces were much more ordinary. Also, regular Cancer students, or the students with the Moon or ascendant in Cancer did not impress me as much.
So it is the Sun/ Moon conjuction in Cancer that produces such agile minds.
In fact, people with Sun/ Moon conjunction in any sign tend to have a much greater IQ than average. Interestingly, many years ago, there was a lengthy article in one of the astrology magazines, where the author studied charts of members of some genius club in England. All members had to have 140+ IQ to be admitted.
The author produced 13 charts for that article, while studying Mercury positions there. What struck me though, that all of them contained Sun/ Moon conjunctions in various signs.
So to me, it is the Sun/ Moon conjunction that enhances our intellect, and, in my experience, this conjunction in Cancer trumps them all.
I should quickly add, that not having such conjunction does not lower your chances for brightness.
The mother of this nephew of mine has also been the brightest in my family for many years. She has no such conjuction, and her only planet in Cancer is Jupiter. Moreover, she was born in 1967 – an unremarkable year in terms of the Moon.
Now there is an even brighter person in our family: my other nephew, Anish Giri (born June 28, 1994), who is a chess prodigy. He met his final grandmaster norm at the age of 14 years, 7 months and 2 days when he beat Venezuelan GM Eduardo. He also became the youngest chess champion of Netherlands. On top of it, he is an excellent student and speaks 5 languages.
Yes, he is a Cancer, but with the Moon in Pisces. Like Cancer Sun/ Moon conjunction, this combination calls for extreme psychic impressionability, but it does not guarantee an exceptional IQ.
Interestingly, Vedic astrology favors full Moon charts when it comes to scoring higher intellect.
My own chart is such, and, although I never measured my IQ until a few years ago, I know that it must have been in 150+ range. I had photographic memory, was incredibly intuitive (my Moon is in Sagittarius – the sign of intuition) and managed to learn 4 years worth of middle and high-school physics in 3.5 days, scoring respectable B on the exam.
Unfortunately, the loss of almost all of my blood in 1998 robbed me of photographic memory, and then consistent lack of sleep for 3.5 yrs after giving birth to my son has taken another 20 points of my IQ. I am still bright enough to notice that I am not as smart as I used to be:)
But the point is, the Moon has a lot to do with how smart we are, much more so than Mercury – which represents the faculty of mind that is more akin to a computer. As we know, the most powerful computer would not be much of help to an idiot.
In traditional Western astrology, the quickness of the mind is measured by how fast the Moon was moving on the day of birth. Yet the Moon represents our feelings and emotions.
In Vedic astrology, the Moon represents the mind, period.
Yes, these 2 branches of astrology differ in much more ways than the what type of zodiac they use.
In Western astrology, the Moon invokes what we consider to be the soul: feelings, emotions, subconscious mind, while the Sun represents our self-identity (ego + super-ego). In Vedic, the Sun invokes the soul.
But those could be just cultural differences as in what the soul or mind/ consciousness mean to us.
What’s more interesting, that in Vedic astrology, the whole zodiac is dedicated to the Moon. Vedic astrology uses Siderial zodiac, which is based upon actual constellations of the ecliptic belt. These constellations are subdivided into 27 Moon mansions, and these 27 subdivisions represent the heart of Vedic astrology. Moreover, Vedic astrologers also like to read a chart from the position of the natal Moon.
This is so, perhaps, because emotional quotient of our lives is much more important to us then the events causing the emotions. In other words, we measure our lives not by how many breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
But it also could be that by ruling our subconscious mind, the Moon truly rules our lives.
I watch Bachelor from time to time, and I found this last season to be particularly fascinating for this reason. The Bachelor, Brad Womack, seriously fell for a single mom, who lost the father of her child to a plane crush 6 years ago. Even though she declared falling in love with Brad, she kept saying that the dead man IS the love of her life. She also admitted to sabotaging all her consequent relationships. Now we know she did the same to Brad.
I believe, consciously she may have been ready for a new man in her life. She said, she dreamt of a wedding, and she did go on The Bachelor despite being intensely private and reserved.
But subconsciously she does not want a relationship for a few reasons:
a) She is terrified of the pain of a possible heart-break (she is aware of that)
b) She is afraid to diminish the memories of her first love or even to cheat on them, perhaps, by replacing them by an actual relationship
I doubt she is aware of this second reason, but it is most likely the main reason why she sabotages her relationships.
There is possibly the 3rd reason:
c) Her great love for the dead man makes her special, and she is afraid to lose that “specialness”.
In other words, as much as she appears to be altogether, incredibly poised and coiffed, subconsciously she is a total mess, and without years of therapy, she is likely to remain single forever.
There was one scene in The Bachelor, that was especially telling to me:
Brad comes over and tries to declare his palpable love for her by saying that he is ready to be the real father to her daughter. But instead of accepting this declaration for what it was, she is grilling him on what does he know about being a father.
So no matter how she may want a relationship consciously, she is most likely to go without it for subconscious reasons.
In fact, every time we fail at something we consciously desire, we should take a good look at our subconscious needs.
As another example of subconsciousness being truly in charge of our lives, I may give you my observations of the homeless men I’ve got to know while volunteering for Coalition For The Homeless some years ago: they all thought badly of money. They called it “The devil’s issue”, “the evil”, “the plague”, etc. I realized then that they all were homeless not because of mental illness, alcoholism, or drug addiction most of them suffered from – as there are plenty of rich crazies, alcoholics and drug-addicts. These ones were poor because subconsciously they were afraid of money.
When we come out of the womb, we are already equipped with our subconscious mind, as oppose to all other mental faculties that take some time to develop.
That’s why the Moon in a natal chart is also associated with the mother (the first person we get to know), and with nurturing (the first activity we are exposed to). As we begin to grow, these psychological roots expand to include home, family, country and all we know we belong to. And all these psychological roots are ruled by the Moon.
Memories, both conscious and subconscious, are how our psychological roots grow, and, of course, the Moon rules our memories.
People like me, with Mercury in Cancer (the sign ruled by the Moon) are famous for our excellent memories.
I am, maybe, more so than others, since I remember 27 of my many past lives.
Of course, not all of these memories occurred to me naturally. While only 2 have appeared to me consciously unprompted, the rest came via deep meditation, past lives regressions, recapitulation and other techniques.
This brings me to what I think the Moon really represents: our astral bodies.
When we die, we leave only physical body behind. But our souls have other bodies: astral, casual, etc. When we re-incarnate, the astral body keeps the imprints of all our previous lives. Those memories don’t disappear. They are simply relegated to the subconscious realm, and so are relatively easy to be accessed.
But like the real Moon that is visible to us only when the Sun sets, we can see our subconsciousness when the conscious mind is temporarily shut off. This is called hypnosis. After all, as a certified hypnotherapist, I should know this. And as such, I’ve been privileged to glimpse the incredible subconscious realm.
There, our calendar age easily coexist with our babyhood, and feelings generated by a past life centuries ago are as strong as if time did not exist.
In fact, to our subconsciousness TIME DOES NOT EXIST. It only knows the present, and it cannot differentiate between events of a life long past and the present.
It is also easily malleable – just like a baby. Yet our conscious mind -the grown up in us, represented by the Sun astrologically – is powerless before it. As long anyway, as it does not venture into the vast darkness of the subconsciousness.
Until then, we may only think we know why we relate to the world the way we do. The true reasons – the memories, the feelings – are buried in the Moon’s realm.
There are many good reasons for why the luminaries, the Sun and the Moon, are given rulership to the day (conscioness / the Sun) and the night (subconsciousness / the Moon) of our being. If you were, say, a serial killer in a previous life, you would not want these memories to surface now. You might not be able to live with yourself in this life.
Each life is given to us as an opportunity to redeem ourselves, and each new identity we develop when reincarnating is, in a sense, a clean slate that allows us to start anew. While our subconsciousness keeps track of all our karmic debts, not knowing them consciously helps finding new solutions to old problems.
Interestingly, this all powerful satellite of ours, the Moon, has been slowly moving away from us. While this is totally unnoticeable in one life time, 100,000 years ago the Moon would have seem as huge at its apogee as it does now at its perigee. I can only imagine what the slow disappearance of the Moon may mean for humanity. Does it mean that in a million years from now, humans will remember all their past lives? Does it mean that our descendants then would no longer be slaves to the misconceptions of their subconsciousness? Would they lose emotions completely or simply be able to control them perfectly?
Are we going to lose the tides of the oceans and would our volcanoes go silent?
When eclipses disappear, would it mean that so would the reasons for these bad omens?
Talking about eclipses, I think I wrote The Meaning Of Solstice Eclipse too soon. Look what happened in Japan. Plus, we started THE THIRD WAR in the Middle East, and Republicans are using whatever power they have regained to kill our fledging economy completely.
Normally, such terrible powers emanate only from Solar eclipses, but this one was LUNAR. And with the Moon at its perigee, it now appears to be more sinister than ever. Not to mention, that it ties into the great grand cross of 2010, falling into 1st cardinal degree.
Perhaps, I’ve misread Mars as the trigger point of that Grand Cross. I am relatively new to mundane astrology, and so eclipses are hard for me to read yet. But, perhaps, the real trigger was this sinister lunar eclipse that fell on the darkest night of the year. Certainly, 2011 is shaping as the most unsettling year for humanity, and the solstice eclipse is the obvious harbinger of this swirling darkness all around. After all, the darkness is the realm of the Moon.