The Libra New Moon is at 17 degrees in Libra.
I overheard a conversation yesterday. A girl was on her phone, angry and frustrated, complaining… but more than complaining about her biology partner. This guy unwittingly spent 20 minutes looking through a microscope at nothing- she was furious. He wouldn’t let her look. He wouldn’t let her help. He wouldn’t let her participate. “That guy hates women,” she said. And went on to express her disgust at him looking at a blank plate on a microscope without even realizing it… Looking for something that wasn’t there.
In her mind, he wanted the power. He wanted the glory, and he had little respect for her thoughts and opinions. And more than her disdain for his behaviour towards women, she was upset because this guy was negatively impacting her education.
I’m in Oxford, and the students here mean business!
I could hear it behind everything that she was saying… I could hear her resolve and intent. This man will not stop me from my worth, from my value, and from my education.
As I looked at the chart for today’s New Moon, this conversation stood out! It was a microcosm of the macrocosm of what is going on. The conflict was between two people. Two students. A man and a woman. But it embodied a greater social conflict. And one that this New Moon highlights.
The New Moon is at 17 degrees of Libra, the sign of relationships, balance, fairness, and justice. It is one of the signs that is ruled by Venus, the feminine goddess of love, values, and worth.
Goddess Energy of the New Moon in Libra
Some of the other Goddesses are with this New Moon. It is opposite Vesta in Aries and square Ceres in Cancer. This brings in the energies of being driven by your own inner passions and drives, sometimes to the exclusion of other people, as well as the inability or difficulty in nurturing and meeting our own needs based on what we may have learned from our mothers or our mothers’ mothers. It’s the lineage of women in our families or our culture that impacts how we go about resolving the conflict in relationships right now. If we learned to quietly suffer, we may rebel. If we learned to subversively use our power, we may find ourselves cooking up a witchy spell. But if we learned to be strong and empowered, we may find an opportunity for deeper learning about ourselves: how we get our needs met, how we pursue our passions, and how we operate within relationships.
As mentioned, the New Moon is ruled by Venus, and Venus is currently in Scorpio and retrograde. This on its own is challenging. It makes us prone to jealousy; we may confront hidden desires, rage, and issues of trust and power. And situations will arise that bring these types of feelings to the forefront. Venus is also making a perfect square to Mars in Leo and is also square to Pluto in Aquarius, and this intensifies all of these feelings to a place where we are likely to act unconsciously.
And the weird thing… behind it all might be a sexual tension or a strange attraction that brings out the worst… I distinctly remember a boy in middle school tripping me and giving me titty twisters… apparently because he liked me???? This is the kind of energy that Venus square Mars brings up. Add in Pluto in Aquarius, and not only do we amplify the dynamic, but we also do so at a larger societal level as well.
The personal is the political—our experiences as women, with the feminine, are not just a personal problem, but a larger problem with the power structure.
A collective intervention might steam out of control.
At its heart, the energy highlights the difficulty we feel with the power of our feelings. Attraction, jealousy, sexual power… And it’s not just men… It’s the masculine within us all.
Mars (the masculine) needs an evolution!
The Sabian symbol: Two men placed under arrest. Rudhyar says that this symbol represents “A breakdown in the constructive relationship between the individual and society, and the expectable result.” At the heart of it, the Sabian symbol is about facing consequences.
And that’s where Thereus comes in.
The asteroids involved at this New Moon are Thereus and Hera.
Before I go into the story of Thereus, let me first mention Hera. Hera is the goddess of marriage, but she was constantly jealous and vengeful of her forever-cheating husband, Zeus. Her appearance here with the New Moon solidifies that it is one about relationships, trust, power, and the emotions that come from them.
And now for the story of Thereus and its importance at this New Moon.
Strangely, when I looked up the myths of Thereus, Tereus came up. I wondered what the difference was. One was a centaur, and the other was a king… and though they have no connection to each other in mythology, linguistically, they are cousins: both derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root which means “to hold, keep, watch”. For the centaur Thereus, this was emphasized in hunting—Thereus was a centaur who dragged bears out of their dens and carried them home alive to his cave. For Tereus, the King, it was meant to emphasize guardianship… which is a very forgiving word for this king because his guardianship in the end was obsessive and predatory!
Since Tereus the king was also predatory, I will tell you that story, even though the asteroid is about the bear-hunting centaur… Thereus with the New Moon highlights feelings of being hunted, captured, and silenced.
The story goes that Tereus was the King of Thrace (or Phocis) and husband to Procne. He is infamous for his brutal crime: deceiving her father by claiming Procne had died to win the hand of Procne’s sister, Philomela, whom he then raped and silenced by cutting out her tongue.
I know… to hold, keep, watch – definitely predatory!
Philomela revealed the atrocity to her sister Procne through an embroidered tapestry, leading the sisters to cook up a plan of revenge. They kill Tereus’s son, Itys, and serve him to his father.
Feels very Venus in Scorpio…
When Tereus found out what they did, he pursued them with an axe. But the gods intervened to end the violence by transforming all of them into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe (or hawk), Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow. It is said that the hawk symbolized his predatory pursuit, forever chasing the sisters he can never catch. The nightingale’s mournful, nocturnal song ensured the tragedy was never forgotten. The swallow, a voiceless bird, mirrored the tongue Tereus cut out.
The consequences are real. And at this New Moon, there may be outside intervention that imposes those consequences. It’s therefore worth it to think through the consequences to the conclusion before acting.
There are various versions of the tale, and in Ovid’s inversion, Philomela actually becomes the nightingale – and the sister whose speech was stolen is now the bird most celebrated for its beautiful song.
Philomela adds an interesting and useful aspect to the story and the New Moon energies. Philomela could not speak, but she was able to communicate with tapestry. This reminds me of the stories of African American women who used quilts to communicate information to slaves about how to escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad, and other stories of escape routes mapped in braided hair. The New Moon makes a sextile to Jupiter in Leo, which represents opportunities hidden in beauty, play, and creative expression. So while we may feel hunted and captured, within the experience lies a creative opportunity. And incidentally, asteroid Philomela is within 5 degrees of Jupiter in Leo.
Happy New Moon in Libra!
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