The full moon in Leo on February 5th was on my mind as I watched the lion dancers at the Lunar New Year celebration I attended recently for one of my children’s schools.
Held in a banquet hall in New York’s Chinatown, it was the first time since early 2020 that the school had hosted the event. Back then, the City was starting to panic about Covid; I remember the mayor urging people to go out and celebrate Lunar New Year, assuring us that everything was safe. Of course, that advice turned out to be terribly wrong.
So, there was something symbolic to the event this year, something that seemed to me to dovetail with the changing astrological winds on the horizon. A crowded banquet hall filled with tables chock-a-block with families and teachers. Middle schoolers roaming around in awkward packs. Sharing platters of fried lobster and lo mein with people who began the evening as strangers but ended as friends.
It all felt shockingly normal.
The Leo full moon was on my mind, as the two-person lions, one red, one black, paraded through the hall being fed donations in red envelopes, because it looked to me like the one discordant note in February, an otherwise fairly quiet astrological month.
This is because this full moon rehashes territory that has been something of a battleground over the past few years, since Saturn entered Aquarius in 2020 and began squaring Uranus in Taurus.
This tense aspect of conflict between forces of change and the status quo was triggered repeatedly since then, most dramatically by Mars whenever it passed through a fixed sign.
But this configuration was also regularly highlighted by the moon several times a month whenever she passed through any of the fixed signs (which adds up to about a third of a given month!).
But this lunation marks the last new or full moon in a fixed sign before Saturn enters Pisces on March 7th, which will end the Saturn-Uranus square (for now).
Full moons always represent a closure of a six-month period that begins at the previous new moon in the same sign. Thus, this full moon is the culmination of a cycle that began with the new moon in Leo on July 28, 2022.
That full moon featured a very tense grand cross (two oppositions at right angles) involving the Sun and Moon in Leo, Saturn in Aquarius, Mars, Uranus, and the North Node in Taurus, and the South Node in Scorpio. This is a configuration of great tension and stress with a dash of unpredictability and conflict thrown in.
The close involvement of the nodes of the moon, tied into the eclipses last year in Scorpio and Taurus, suggest just how much change has been in the air in the topics connected to the fixed signs in our charts and lives.
Think back six months ago, to the topics associated with the fixed signs in your chart. There likely has been some stress and forced growth or change in these areas since then.
Oppositions represent polar opposites that, by their very nature, are at odds. The opposition is of the nature of Saturn, according to ancient astrologers, meaning that it demands hard work, and sometimes loss, to try to bridge the opposing sides. And sometimes the gulf remains too vast, the differences too insurmountable.
By contrast, in the full moon in Leo this weekend these tensions are significantly reduced. We have the Sun and Moon in opposition in Aquarius and Leo. Saturn is still in Leo, but moving swiftly (for Saturn) away, about to enter Pisces.
Uranus is still in Taurus and is in a close square with the Sun and Moon, which reminds us of the instability we’ve been through, and which may still be in the cards as we finish out this month. But Mars isn’t causing trouble in this lunation, over in Gemini.
The nodes of the moon, too, are moving on, almost out of Taurus and Scorpio, where they’ve been changing things up in concert with the eclipses. We’re about to begin a crossover series of eclipses, a preview of sorts of the coming Aires-Libra eclipses of next year.
More reminders of change — of all that may have changed along the fixed signs in our lives.
Yet, all full moons represent some kind of tension, with the Moon and Sun in opposition. The tension of this particular full moon is between the self (Leo) and the non-self (Aquarius), the group, the disembodied hive mind.
All the World is a Stage
Thus, these couple of days when the moon grows to fullness in Leo are a good time to reflect on questions of self-expression, of how our idealized selves match up to who we are in the world.
Leo is the Sun’s one and only home sign, after all, and represents the solar impetus to be and be seen for who we are. The Moon is the body, emotions, the repository of memory and the past within each of us. In Leo, these things must be expressed, often creatively.
All the world is a stage for this moon placement, which reflects the Sun’s light in its home territory. There’s often an aura of glamour and charisma that surrounds people born with the Moon in Leo.
It’s no surprise that many of the most famous performers share this placement, from Tom Cruise to David Bowie to Monica Bellucci.
Whatever else the natal chart suggests, Moon in Leo folks often have some aspect to their lives where they ham it up and take the stage, even if only for a classroom of kindergarteners or an audience of convention-goers. Whatever stage they can take advantage of, they usually do.
Speaking of dances, leonine or otherwise, here’s David Bowie (Capricorn Sun, Leo Moon, and Aquarius rising, with appropriately leonine hair), with his classic Let’s Dance, with its intriguing, if bewildering, narrative of post-colonial flirtation with (and rejection of) urbanity.
And ruby slippers as a portal of sorts between the Outback and. . . a factory? An appropriate representation, if there ever was one, of the Leo-Aquarius dichotomy, of dispassionate social critique vs. . . . a nice pair of red shoes ready for the stage.
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