June 28 to July 28
• 8° Cancer New Moon is Tuesday, June 28, 7:52 PM PDT
• New Moon Theme: June 28 – July 28: Balancing a New Paradigm
• The New Moon releases a new wave of available potential that sets the overall theme for the entire Lunar cycle that follows. This creative momentum is for energizing your life’s purpose and personal growth, especially while adjusting to evolving circumstances.
Co-authored by Elizabeth Schermer
Astrology Article
The Point Between What Was and What's to Come
Our Cancer New Moon represents a balancing point between the past and the future, and the opportunity for a new direction in life based on what inspires you. The New Moon follows last week’s summer solstice. This combination sets the stage for a shift in the overall astrological energies of the year. With this shift, we are all heading into an uncharted territory of new potential in which self-determination and the power of choice will be a premium quality to possess.
The June 21st solstice ushered in a heightened awareness of the importance of individuality, with the need to re-balance one’s relationship between selfhood and the larger collective. This quality of self-correction addresses the current cultural imbalances, setting to right the collective’s attempts to control our world by seizing and holding more power and influence than is warranted.
Cancer plays an important role within the principle of wholeness by nurturing self-determination and emotional balance, especially through the power of choice. In order for the spiritual principle of wholeness to operate for the highest good of all humanity, there must always be a healthy balance between the individual and the collective.
Cancer as an Individualizing Catalyst for Self-Determination
Of all the zodiac signs, Cancer has the most potential for supporting individuality. Astrology defines individuality as the inner awareness of one’s authentic selfhood and spiritual center of being. This transition to selfhood is possible at any stage of life. It represents an awakening of a subjective knowing that one’s soul essence is both unique and divine.
This development of a sense of self enables our successful transition out of the collective’s influence and control. Cancer’s process of individualization represents a new type of allegiance toward self-determination, through one’s direct and personal connection to the universe. This process of awakening to true individuality allows a person to choose their own direction in life, independent of any limiting or negative influence of group dynamics.
The successful process of individuation is a moment-to-moment experience that is nurtured through the Moon’s ability to help us adjust to our circumstances. As the ruler of Cancer, the Moon is playing a significant role in supporting our ability to find a new balance point as we enter a shifting paradigm. This quality of adjustment through self-determination enables the individual to participate in groups and the larger collective out of freewill instead of any form of coercion or control.
Qualities of Cancer
The cardinal water sign of Cancer supports self-determination through the emotional, feeling aspect of our nature. Emotions are developed in different ways in each of the water signs of the zodiac. In Cancer our emotions are developed through our feeling nature, which is grounded and connected to our emotional body.
This connection to grounding and emotional stability can be understood through Cancer’s location at the nadir (bottom) of the zodiac wheel. Cancer’s association with the nadir is related to the two most important factors of Cancer, which are emotional stability and emotional security. These qualities are developed through the power of choice, which is why Cancer requires the freedom of self-determination.
Cancer is where we learn to be at home with ourselves and the world. Key qualities of Cancer include focus, choice, decisive decision-making, self-determination, emotional stability, emotional maturity, and healthy empathy. Healthy empathy requires the creation of clear boundaries, in order to not be overwhelmed or manipulated by others.
Cancer supports the creation of healthy boundaries through our emotional intelligence and feeling nature. By developing personal boundaries we create an energetic container or field. This focused field allows us to integrate our life at an emotional level with a sense of security and trust.
The development of healthy emotionality is where the Cancer personality shines and is able to move forward in life with stable conviction, sensitivity, and the ability to live without being negatively influenced or controlled by others. In this way, a person becomes emotionally independent and mature, able to make individualized decisions toward self-determination, while still being a full member of one’s group.
The Significance of Summer Solstice
The Solstice degree of 1° Cancer marks a turning point for the entire year. On the longest day of the year, the moment of strongest solar intensity creates a new point of individual awareness of our ability to choose our own direction in life.
The Sabian archetype for 1° Cancer beautifully expresses this opportunity for reorientation and new allegiance.
1° CANCER — ON A SHIP THE SAILORS LOWER AN OLD FLAG AND RAISE A NEW ONE
THEME: REORIENTATION
ARCHETYPE: A radical change of allegiance, exteriorized in a symbolic act signifying ‘A POINT OF NO RETURN.’
COMMENTARY: There is now a freedom to make individualized decisions for moving forward. This is a crowning hour, with the day-force fully active. Consequences are of the highest premium. What’s needed is a larger perspective of allegiance. Decisions and consequences are necessary to reorient the ways in which one moves toward establishing a greater sense of stability.
What represents the past for each of us is no longer our defining factor. We each have the opportunity to raise a new flag with a new allegiance to a higher form of guidance. The future is unknown, with new uncharted territory, something that we can only imagine.
The Cancer New Moon
Our New Moon follows the solstice with a new quality of energy that enables us to make self-determining decisions for ourselves. This is a time to let go of the past (lowering the old flag) and look for new inspiration and new opportunities that call us forward to something greater.
Our Sabian archetype for the New Moon sheds some additional light on the importance of looking for new examples of higher expressions and choices, especially when personal growth is at a premium.
8° CANCER — A GROUP OF RABBITS DRESSED IN HUMAN CLOTHES WALK AS IF ON PARADE
THEME: A NEW LEARNING PROCESS
ARCHETYPE: The tendency in all forms of life to imitate higher forms as a stimulus to growth.
COMMENTARY: Looking to exemplars for inspiration, and imitating their actions, is a positive form of growth leading to new potentials and greater forms of personal expression. New learning is enhanced through the process of watching and emulating what is seen as successful, and fitting into the larger principles of universal cooperation.
The rabbits in this archetype represent our emotional nature, with the inspiration to reach toward higher forms of development. Wearing human clothes symbolizes emulating higher forms of consciousness, including guidance from our higher selves.
Following higher forms of inspiration can now work as a positive form of growth within our own learning processes. We are astrologically heading into new and uncharted territory. Our decision-making needs to be in line with individualized thinking and free from all forms of limitation, including the current unhealthy control of the collective mind-set.
Astrology Pattern
The pattern of this New Moon chart is a bowl formation containing an expanded double sextile. This bowl represents a concentrated and focused energy that is being highly energized by the New Moon and Pluto.
New Moon Leads the Bowl
What’s most significant about this bowl is that the New Moon (Sun conjunct Moon) is at the leading edge of the chart, with Pluto as the trailing planet. All other planets are held within this structure.
With the New Moon as the leading energy of the bowl, the rest of the planets are all working together to support the momentum of the new Lunar cycle. This further emphasizes the opportunity for new directions and freedom of choice, both for individuals and for humanity as a whole.
Pluto as the Trailing Planet
Pluto is the slowest moving planet and holds the most raw power of any body in the solar system. As the last planet in the New Moon bowl, every other planetary body in the chart has already crossed over (transited) Pluto. (The planets move counter clockwise.) As each planet passes over Pluto, Pluto imparts an element of its energy. In this way, each planet has received from Pluto the raw power to transform.
This particular astrological location of Pluto represents an extraordinary amount of transformative potential that is contained within the entire chart. This quality of transformation is further emphasized by the New Moon at the leading edge, providing a new direction for humanity.
Expanded Double Sextile
What we are calling an expanded double sextile has Neptune loosely conjunct Jupiter at the midpoint. Looking at the chart, you can see that Jupiter is technically beyond the conjunction point (12 degrees apart), but within the overall energies of this chart, we can consider that they are working together.
Working with Neptune and Jupiter as a loose conjunction, they form an expanded double sextile. A double sextile creates extra support to organize consciousness around the themes of the planets involved.
Neptune and Jupiter hold the ability to expand our personal responses to a higher (individualized) spiritual pattern. Neptune transcends, while Jupiter manages and organizes. In this way, Jupiter manages Neptune’s ability to expand to a higher frequency.
Pluto in Capricorn has the power to organize what is being transformed, using existing power structures (retrograde).
Venus at 8° Gemini will help you organize around what you consider most just and true, and in balance with your personal values.
The four planets working together in this expanded double sextile will reflect a new direction that’s capable of organizing the awareness of our direction toward something new and different. This new direction will be solely dependent on the spiritual orientation (Neptune) of the individual.
Spiritually orientated individuals will see this lunar cycle as an opportunity to respond to their circumstances from a new perspective, based on the power of personal choice. This quality of freedom isn’t controlled by others, or limited by outside agendas. Those who struggle with finding their own spiritual orientation could find themselves unconsciously falling into line with popular thinking, and following those whom they consider to be in the limelight. (These are shadows of Neptune as well as the New Moon Sabian.)
Co-creating Our Future
The Sabian archetype for Neptune in the midpoint position of the double sextile highlights the diversity of purpose that will predominate the new direction in which humanity is headed. Because these are transcendent energies, the types of individual responses will vary greatly, depending on each person’s level of individuation.
♆ — 26° PISCES — WATCHING THE VERY THIN MOON CRESCENT APPEARING AT SUNSET, DIFFERENT PEOPLE REALIZE THAT THE TIME HAS COME TO GO AHEAD WITH THEIR DIFFERENT PROJECTS
THEME: DIVERSITY OF PURPOSE
ARCHETYPE: A keen appreciation of the value of individualized responses to any challenge of life.
COMMENTARY: A single and basic cosmic-spiritual impulse will lead individuals into varied patterns of responses. The power of individual purpose and new reaction to life’s circumstances is fully realized through the letting go of all types of rigid thinking.
I believe that this New Moon will trigger a variety and wide spectrum of individualized responses. The creative potential for a variety of individual responses speaks directly to the transcendent power of Neptune in this position. Jupiter’s power to manage these transcendent energies will support the new momentum through our ability to focus on the emerging opportunities for a new positive direction.
In hindsight, we may see this New Moon as a key milestone, representing Neptune’s role of spiritual awakening across our planet.
Summary
We are at currently at a balancing point between what was and what will come. This New Moon chart brings forward a powerful opportunity for a new awareness of individuality, especially through our emotional intelligence and the power of choice. This is most true for those who can recognize the inspiration of a cosmic or spiritual impulse operating within their individualized awareness.
This is a time to recognize your focus of individual choice and self-determination. The world may be going in one direction, but the Cancer New Moon enables us each to choose an individualized response to life based on self-determination. What type of future we choose to create together will be directly reflected within our personal awakening and our ability to emotionally separate from the current paradigms of collective control that we’re all experiencing.
The past is over and done. What lies ahead may be unknown, but with an individualized orientation of consciousness, the collective no longer has the power to choose for us. We have entered a new paradigm. We each stand now at a powerful point of balance between what was and what’s to come.
Happy New Moon,
Steven Shroyer
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