Eclipses have a bad reputation. This relates to the days when only kings and queens had their horoscopes prepared — and what might befall a ruler meant the entire village was going to suffer or succeed as well.

The fact that an eclipse involves an astronomical exactitude can, for individuals, translate into a sense of pressure that triggers increased or diminished awareness. In other words, a lunar eclipse like tonight’s illuminates what is sending you to sleep— distancing you from the awakened state.

Eclipses are anachronistic. Dimmed lunar light tweaks cellular memory — that reptilian/mammalian part of the brain which winds through our DNA like a tendril. Dreams unhinge, longings feel jammed-to-bursting. Again, it’s about the amplification of awareness — how it ascends or descends — and what that sets off in our habitual nature.

The early-century occultist Rudolph Steiner had a wild theory about eclipses and I’ll share it here because it’s so fascinating. This is from Dennis Elwell‘s stellar book Cosmic Loom:

He said they serve as safety valves, a solar eclipse carrying out into space the evil that spreads over the earth, so that it might work its havoc in a less concentrated sphere. A lunar eclipse, on the other hand, allows evil thoughts present in the cosmos to approach those humans who are willing to be possessed by them.

Kind of creepy. But the point here, if we move away from the goofy moralistic tone, is that eclipses shift or tilt the balance between solar and lunar properties, and how we as humans align with those impressions via intention or choice or accident.

Eclipses are easier to comprehend, in a practical way, if viewed through the lens of Gurdjieff‘s cosmology. Where the Moon is associated with emotional habits that support sleep-walking, a kind of devolution. And the Sun is linked to awareness, concentrated presence, a quality of one-pointedness that is very ‘now’-oriented; not retro-pulled towards old memories or conventional ways of being.

If momentum in one’s life is towards the Moon — a calcification of the psyche — a lunar eclipse heightens this dilemma. A solar eclipse does the opposite — assists the ascending solar arc towards the awakened state.

So, what of Libra, the sign in which the Sun is situated during tonight’s eclipse?

Libra is an unusual symbol. Neither human or animal. Within the Zodiac’s menagerie of living beings, Libra marks the virtues that transcend the passions personified by our instinctive, me-first nature. Aries, where the Moon is transiting during the eclipse, is the wolf in the wolfman.

Here’s the equation: You have Libra, the one sign in the Zodiac that corresponds with what you could call Platonic ideals — like truth, beauty, civility — intermeshed with the part of our nature that just wants what it wants when it wants it. A marriage of the animal and the divine.

In more pragmatic terms, we can say that relational paradoxes become the theatrical setting for the eclipse. Put another way: Whatever you are in relationship to is under scrutiny. Props are being rearranged, characters swapped. Something or someone is ‘coming’ — while something or someone is ‘going.’ What remains?

As this is a lunar eclipse, pay attention to the hypnotic lure of nostalgia and sentimentality. What function do these emotions serve? Or, put another way: What is the price of living in the past?

Aside from the security that’s born from our relationship to the familiar, there’s more afoot in this equation, a harder truth to consider: We might discover that what we cling to, for the sake of sustaining a relationship, is something akin to a corpse.

The Sufis were never big on emotional states like grief, pining, moping — typified in the old Sufi aphorism: “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” Kind of corny, but there’s innate wisdom there. Try it on tonight as you throw out your old garb.





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Opening art: Paul Klee, Possibilities at sea, 1932.