September’s Full Moon promises a dreamy reprieve from the heavy, Saturnian lunation last month – albeit a potentially confusing one.
The Full Moon goes exact in the wee hours of the morning on September 10, at 17 Pisces. The Moon is conjunct Neptune at 24 Pisces and ruled by Jupiter, who is the next sign over at 5 Aries.
This conjunction to Neptune flavours the Full Moon with a dreamlike, illusory quality. The rulership by Jupiter in fiery Aries somewhat tempers the watery, imaginal quality and infuses it with optimistic drive and impulse – but the direction of that drive might not be very clear.
However, Full Moons always feature a balance by the Sun occupying the opposite sign from the Moon, so the Sun’s position in critical Virgo grounds the Moon’s ephemeral pairing with Neptune. Venus has joined the Sun in Virgo, so she fuses that side of the lunation with a drive to make a plan for working together with others. The danger is getting a little too overly critical of those you’re partnered with, and having a hard time accepting deprecations levied by Virgo’s ruler, Mercury – but the two are in mutual reception, bolstering their ability to cooperate effectively.
Mercury plays a key role in this chart not just because he rules one half of the lunation, as well as Mars in Gemini – which is in a T-square with the Full Moon and its Venus/Neptune pairings on either side – but also because Mercury stations retrograde at 8 Libra only hours before the Full Moon goes exact. Thus, a newly retrograde Mercury plays a starring role in this lunation.
Initially I thought this might signify unsteady, confusing and/or illusory war-related news and sabre-rattling. It still might, however as I type this, the announcement of Queen Elizabeth II’s death is only a couple of hours old. It seems pretty clear that this Full Moon will focus on this news and all the surrounding issues of a truly monumental, generational power transfer.
Overall, it feels like a barrage of confusing images and messages coloured with a martial flavour. There’s a growing urgency underneath the mutable, go-with-the-flow vibes. There seems to be a desire to work together for common goals, but the question is whether we can achieve that in the face of conflict and contradiction coming from all sides.
The Saturn-Uranus square across Aquarius and Taurus is still very close and getting closer, though it doesn’t really interact directly with this Full Moon. Rather, it’s a backdrop of tension between liberation and restriction that we’ve been under since early 2021, and which will heighten perceptibly as we move forward thinking about these bit questions of rulership, power, governance and empire.
What to do with these energies? It’s not the best time to charge forward on a new project per se, though it’s a great time for brainstorming and theoretical, blue-sky conversations about your goals and things currently underway. If you feel an urgency to do something, let yourself focus on the big picture stuff rather than trying to figure out all the details and specifics.
You might find yourself drifting off into memories of the past or dreams of the future. The present may not feel quite real. Mercury’s retrograde station, such a prominent punctuation mark over this Full Moon, brings with it the promise that whatever you do now, you’ll have to revisit it in a few weeks’ time. Take care to reinforce any foundations you’re building right now, or delay them for a more grounded time.