New Moon in Capricorn, December 29 2016, 7 Capricorn 59, 1:53 AM EST
Nothing real can be threatened.
Beyonce spoke these words on her most recent album Lemonade. That idea is infused into the Capricorn New Moon.
The New Moon takes place in the sign of Capricorn, conjunct Mercury retrograde just past the heart of the Sun. These three bodies are strummed together in a single chord, so that they are all heard in unison.
This New Moon begins a new lunar cycle that contains the invitation to call forth the single pointedness of mind to discern the noise from the signal. Mercury just beyond inferior conjunction at the precise moment of the New Moon carries its message forward beyond Mercury’s station direct on January 8, deep into the lunar cycle, through to the next New Moon.
The trickster archetype is thoroughly infused into the New Moon’s moment. Mercury has long been heralded as a trickster in several guises, and on the same day, within hours of the New Moon, Uranus, a trickster of the highest order, turns direct.
What could this mean for humans in the sublunar sphere?
Before I get there, let me tell you about another aspect coloring this month’s New Moon. Mars in Pisces, just beyond the fateful South Node of the Moon, and inching closer to a visual union with Neptune, creates a sextile aspect to this Moon’s new beginning. In its best expression, this signals a new beginning in which what happens in the next 30 or so days, is motivated by the unutterable desires of the soul. It is an invitation to deepen all worldly works by contacting the shades of nuanced emotion of the heart, before performing outer action.
Mercury, being retrograde, is thought to direct its influence more inwardly than outwardly. That is in part why this planet’s time in retrograde motion is considered to be a superlatively good time to reconsider rather than plow forward with the new. This is a time to let a reconsideration of what has passed create a deliberate shift in what is being done now, creating an intelligently informed plan of action for the future.
Back to those tricksters. The trickster archetype provokes expanded consciousness. That is its function. Tricksters make rule-respecting, routine-expecting humans tilt their heads to see the world in a different color than usual. They encourage us not to take for granted that life is often lived according to ready made and already established modes of existing — especially in social relation to each other — and through their wily disruptions, shake up routines in order to ask us if we had a choice, is this the way we’d really want to be living. The message of this New Moon is that a choice in self-created modes of living is at hand, and that altering the colors of the closest connections (Mercury) ripples out to much larger effects (Uranus).
Right now, we’re living in Trickster Times. Because when civilisations start to become moribund; when social, economic and political systems stagnate, and empires become degenerate and unresponsive to the needs of the people, in walks Trickster to shake it all up. Trickster is the catalyst, the disruptor who sparks off the tearing down of the old order. In the story we’re living through today, Trickster is the one who undermines the élitist establishment which refuses to be held accountable to the people it’s supposed to serve. Lewis Hyde, in his wonderful book Trickster Makes the World, argued that Trickster is the archetypal disruptive intelligence which all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. But that change is always an alarming process, and one in which there are no guarantees: what follows might not be better.
~Sharon Blackie, Trickster Times