Full Moon in Aries

Today brings the Full Moon. The Moon, newly in Aries, stands fully lit opposite the Sun in Libra, and it falls almost on top of Neptune. The Sun is exactly opposite Neptune as well, so this whole Full Moon runs along a Neptune line. A Full Moon sets two demands facing each other at full brightness. Neptune loosens edges: between one person and another, and between what is and what is hoped for. Together they tend to make feeling run high while the facts underneath go soft. Sympathy and imagination come easily today, and so do misreading, wishful thinking and quiet evasion.

The opposition has a particular shape. Ptolemy places the Sun's exaltation in Aries, where the days begin to lengthen and heat increases, and its fall in Libra, where the Sun passes into the lower half of the year. Today the reflected light sits in the Sun's strongest sign while the Sun itself sits in its weakest. What flares, reacts and insists tends to outshine the slower work of weighing one side against the other.

Neptune has been in Aries for some time, and that is background, not news. Today the Full Moon lands on it, and a long, general condition becomes briefly specific. Neptune works by dissolution, and the same loosening produces both its gifts and its confusions. Sepharial, writing in 1920, read Neptune in hard contact with either light as a sign of deceit. In plain terms, this is a poor day to settle anything on impression alone. Check what you were told, and check what you told yourself.

The Sun is also exactly trine Pluto. With Uranus, the Sun and Pluto form a grand trine in air, a closed circuit in which each supports the others. Pluto in flowing contact gives depth and staying power without crisis. The cost of a grand trine is that nothing in it compels anyone to use what it offers. Neptune changes that. Opposite the Sun and sextile to both Uranus and Pluto, it turns the trine into a kite. The Sun becomes the point under demand, and Neptune's pull gives all that ease somewhere to go.

The Uranus–Pluto trine and the Neptune–Pluto sextile have held for years. Today the Sun switches them on. Its contacts to Pluto and Neptune have just passed exact and will loosen over the coming days, while its trine to Uranus is still closing.

Black Moon Lilith, in the first degree of Capricorn, squares both ends of the Full Moon, the Moon almost exactly. The sky arranges this as a T-square with Black Moon Lilith at the apex, where the strain collects. Red Milenaria reads the Black Moon as a power that was taken away and seeks to reassert itself: frustrations that can no longer be denied. Demetra George reads it as a suppressed force returning to healthy expression. Under this Full Moon, whatever was set aside to keep the peace tends to stop accepting its place. Nothing stands at the point opposite the apex, in early Cancer, so nothing in the sky offers that pressure a release. It has to be given one deliberately, said plainly rather than left to leak out sideways. The Moon's part in this figure passes within two days.

Separately, Mars is squaring Chiron, and that square is exact and still closing. Mars sits in the last degree of Cancer, in its fall, where Ptolemy holds its fiery nature is at its least intense. Chiron sits in the last degree of Aries, retrograde, back in that sign since mid-September. Chiron marks the wound that does not close by ordinary means, and its aspects show what keeps reopening it. A low-burning Mars pressing on it tends to bump old sore spots, so irritation arrives out of proportion to its cause.

Mars is also slowly closing an opposition to Pluto, still wide, and the sky binds the three into a T-square with Chiron at the apex. The counsel under Pluto holds here. Do not let frustration pile up unspoken, and do not let someone else's pressure stand in for your own judgment.

All of this sits harder for anyone with planets in the first few degrees of Aries, Libra or Capricorn, or in the closing degrees of Cancer and Aries.

The useful practice while the Moon crosses Aries is simple. Before acting on a strong feeling, find one fact that confirms it. And if something has been swallowed for too long, say it cleanly and in your own words, once, rather than letting it surface at a slant.