The Lunar Eclipse in Taurus: Emergence in Emergency on the Eve of the Election
Next week, we can eclipse fascism or democracy: the choice is ours
If Tuesday’s Election Day Lunar Eclipse were an ordinary Full Moon in Taurus like the sort we usually get around this time of year, I’d be writing a litany of pleasure-centric posts this week, offering tips to dive into taste, scent, touch, sight and sound to ground your body and linger in deliciousness. You should still use pleasure as a healing tool when stress and anxiety spike this coming week, but first you have to fucking vote.
We are at a precarious precipice as a collective, and that means I have to talk to you about what we call “politics.” I hate this severely limited word, because it silos us into binary thinking (Democrat vs. Republican) and turns off people who aren’t tuned into the day-to-day news cycle. Alas, we have to use it and use it hard. Eclipses starkly reveal the way our own cognitive binaries block us from accessing our whole selves.
The thing about eclipses is that they do what they say they’ll do: they ECLIPSE. We look to the house in our chart where an eclipse lands to see what we should lean into letting go of. When we resist (resist is a very Taurean word) the eclipse often makes fast work of cutting us off from the thing we’re trying to cling to. If an eclipse aspects a particular planet in our chart, we can get a more definitive sense of what to release. Right now, we’re living through the eclipse of Twitter, providing an instructive example of what eclipses can do.
Twitter is a Taurus rising with the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Uranus all in Aquarius. Most notably, the upcoming eclipse is almost exactly squaring Twitter’s natal Uranus, in its 10th House of Status. Memelord Elon Musk’s very bad week turned into a bad weekend, and next week is likely to be worse. All of us who have loved Twitter — journalists, scientists, artists, activists and others who’ve found joy and community there — will have to find a way to meet up in the afterlife of Twitter. (Speaking of this, see y’all on Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@stefanieirisweiss.)
As moments in time that screenshot the karmic nodes, eclipses force a reckoning. They often force us to take notice of everything going on in our lives and the way we interact with the world. They work in six-month cycles within 18-month cycles within 18-year cycles, allowing us to reflect on what we’ve invited in that’s no longer working — what we need to put on the altar and burn. Eclipses create can’t-look-away moments. It’s hard to just glide on by, doing your thing, especially if your chart is in the crosshairs. That’s what this election is all about - crystalizing the moment in time when America will either remain a democracy or fall to fascism because we lose our right to vote. For more on why this is so crucial, read this.
Tuesday’s Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse at 16 degrees of Taurus (exact at 6:02 am EST) is conjunct boundary-breaker Uranus and square boundary-creator Saturn, making it impossible to make any predictions about the election. It’s an implosion and explosion happening simultaneously, in the same space. It feels shrill to me, like someone screaming in a rage-soaked falsetto and shattering the windows in a house we’re all trying to shelter in. Something is being eclipsed from our lives, but we’re too busy dodging jagged shards to make any sense of it quite yet.
How can we find stability in the chaos? First, we can vote. We can definitively, clearly, unequivocally, energetically state that we believe our bodies belong to us, that civil rights are worth saving, that our seniors deserve social security, that the truth means something, that conspiracy, racism, and antisemitism is morally abhorrent, and most of all: that democracy matters. If we lose our right to vote, we lose everything. And the Republicans have said out loud, in the open, over and over, that they will take away our right to vote and plunge us into an autocracy if they take back power in the House and Senate.
All of the post-pandemic healing we have to do, all the pleasures we’ve not yet tasted — those Taurean temptations will be even more impossible to invite into our lives once the fascist transition is complete. We’re moving into the Pluto in Aquarius era starting next March. We can shape this right now by using people-power to save democracy so that techno-authoritarianism/digital dictatorship fails before it begins. This Total Lunar Eclipse, visible over the eastern portion of the USA, puts this power in the hands of the Americans. We can eclipse fascism or let them eclipse our democracy. Which will you choose?