Black moon in Aquarius

The Year of the Iron Tiger has begun and in Chinese astrology, this first New Moon is known as the Black Moon. It is still very hot here in the mountains and the nights are filled with starlight, moonless skies like a glittering shawl — a perfect time for sktclad workings and dreaming up visions of the year now emerging. Like many others, this optimistic Valentine’s Day celebration has been darkened by the suicide of iconic designer Alexander McQueen whose fantastical and menacing lobster claw heels entered my dreams of dancing a gavotte on the ocean floor. And perhaps  that intense umbilical cord to mother love that snapped when McQueen’s mother died was his last link to this earthly plane. Shine on, bright and lovely dancer!

The New Moon in Aquarius is conjoined with Chiron the Wounded Healer and the creative surging  energies of Neptune. A little edgy? I am prone to overwhelm when Neptune floods the planetary alignments. Too much sea, too much deep water. But the Sabian symbol at 27 degrees Aquarius is especially calming and beautiful. Violets and forget-me-nots in an old earthen bowl. This is an image that recalls to me a  grandmother setting out to make potpourri, the fresh flowers tumbled together in a deep terracotta bowl, purple and scented, flowers of remembrance. Images of  a unifying sensibility, a coming together to create something lovely, the elusive beauty and impermanence of fragrance. And a small handful of violets stands for many nof us as a lesbian symbol, the sign of women-bonding. I think too of DH Lawrence’s poem Bavarian Gentians  about the luminousity of the dark, darkness blazing and  a violet power in that blue-black darkness. Another kind of descent in the dark moon, sowing seeds and dreaming and gazing down into the ocean of the Unconscious.

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in Soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s
      gloom,
ribbed and torchlike, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off
      light,
lead me then, lead me the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
      lost bride and groom.