This Cancer new moon teaches us about security and vulnerability. It teaches us about holding and withholding, sharing and protecting. Here, we learn about the cosmic crab that carries its house on its back. We learn about the shell that keeps us safe, impenetrable, hidden. We learn about the soft, emotional insides beneath that shell and all the truths, needs, and wounds that we guard so fiercely there.
This partial solar eclipse is going to crack that shell, friends. It’s going to strip it back and expose that tender, pale flesh underneath. Our security may be challenged in this Cancer eclipse. With the water moon, we may get a mad case of the feels. But it’s in our best interest to partner with this energy and use it to get in touch with our internal emotional bodies and to remodel our external protective shells.
On eclipses, the energy can be unpredictable, confronting, and volatile, but also incredibly powerful. In a solar eclipse, the invisible new moon slides directly between the Earth and the Sun, and for a moment all three are lined up. The Moon—the symbol of our inner lives, our subconscious, our intuition, our emotional body—blocks the Sun, the symbol of our consciousness, ego, self-awareness, and external lives. This creates an atmosphere ripe for listening to our inner voices and allowing the subconscious to come forth. This is an opportunity to examine where our inner and outer lives are out of synch, particularly where our egos are bullying us into ignoring our intuition. What inner whispers have you been tuning out? Where have you forced yourself out of alignment for the sake of reputation, ambition, or responsibility? Where is the sweet, neglected child inside of you asking for healing, for rest, for love?
This inner/outer dichotomy is especially powerful this new moon in the sign of Cancer (the sign is ruled by the moon, herself), inviting us to identify where we’ve outgrown our shells. Cancer is associated with the home, nurturing, safety, the past, and maternal energy—but don’t mistake Cancer’s softness for weakness. Quite the contrary, Cancer knows the huge POWER of softness, of receptivity. Cancer is intuitive to the point of psychic ability. Cancer sees past your shell, feels your wounds, and knows how to heal them. In the Tarot, Cancer rules The Chariot, a card of achievement, alignment, and forward movement. And like The Chariot, Cancer can lead us to massive progress, but only as long as we’re willing to step outside our comfort zones. In Smith-Waite imagery, The Charioteer wears armor, but they’re outside the walls of the city, symbolizing that sometimes you have to leave home in order to grow.
This moon, we leave home. Tonight, we’re asked to listen to our insides, to dip into the soft flesh beneath the shell, and determine what part of our tender selves is ready to come forth. We’re invited to reconsider our protective mechanisms to decide if they’re still serving us—or if they’re constricting us. We are challenged to look at the truths we’ve been guarding and to speak them, to acknowledge the wounds we’ve been hiding from the world and to heal them. What part of you is ready to be seen, loved, nurtured, embraced in the full light of the sun, friends? What shift needs to take place in order to live in your truth? Tonight, we crack the shell, and we do it because we no longer need it.
NEW MOON SOLAR ECLIPSE IN CANCER TAROT SPREAD
For cracking the shell. For internal emergence. For bringing the inside out.
THE BEACH: the area of life that this eclipse season will be most affecting.
THE CRAB: the part of ourselves that needs attention right now.
THE SHELL: where we’ve been protecting/shielding/hiding ourselves. A shell we’ve outgrown.
THE FLESH: the vulnerable truth beneath the shell. What aspect of self is asking to be seen.
THE GULL: what we’re afraid of. The fears/doubts around removing the shell.
THE CLAWS: our strength, our power. How we can assist ourselves in this shift.
THE WAVES: what will keep us safe. What will nurture us. What we can depend on during times of uncertainty and change.
ASTRO DETAILS
Eclipses often feel confronting and hard, but they challenge us in order to accelerate our growth. Today’s eclipse kicks off a string of three in the next few weeks (the next full and new moons are both lunar and solar eclipses, respectively) and starts a larger series of Cancer/Capricorn eclipses that will continue through 2019 and into 2020. The houses in which the Cancer/Capricorn axis fall in your natal chart will be important points of shifting and transformation over this eclipse season, so take a look and get ready for a shakedown.
Pluto in Capricorn has an otherworldly hand in this eclipse too, exactly opposing the new moon and ensuring that we go extra, extra deep on this one. Pluto, Roman god of the underworld, is the planet of the shadow, the inner search, the continual transformation. This isn’t going to be a fun transformation, though. We’re not talking about teen-movie makeover transformation; we’re talking about monster movie transformation. The kind where it turns out you’re a werewolf and you just figured it out because your face is peeling off and your skeleton is twisting and your back is sprouting hair and you have a sudden hunger for human flesh. That kind of transformation. This eclipse is less Death card and more Tower card. But it’s important to remember that the hard transformations, the utter destruction of the Tower, those can be the most cleansing, revolutionary, freeing, and needed transformations.
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