New Moon in Scorpio — Nov. 16, 2009, 19:14 UT
Monday, November 16th, 2009The passionate Scorpio New Moon occurs at the time of a Saturn-Pluto square, the first in a series of three. The current square was exact on Nov. 15, 2009. We get to experience the two other squares next year, the second one already in January, and the last one in August. For more information on the Saturn-Pluto cycle, please read what Eric Francis writes about it at Planet Waves: Beyond the Reactionary Floorshow.
A new moon is a potent time for beginnings. Pluto is the powerful ruler of Scorpio, the sign of renewal and transformation. Besides squaring Saturn, Pluto is now also forming a sextile to an actual dwarf planet candidate called Snow White, currently in the first degree of Pisces. Mercury, the messenger of gods, in the early degrees of Sagittarius, is square to Snow White.
Snow White is a nickname for a big and bright Kuiper belt object 2007 OR10. The name was given to her by the discoverers, Schwamb, Brown and Rabinowitz. This distant icy planet has just recently received a permanent number 225088, which means that now she can be officially named, too. According to astrologer Philip Sedgwick who has contacted Mike Brown, any name proposal hasn’t been made yet by the discoverers. 2007 OR10 is currently the largest known solar system object without an official name.
The orbital period of Snow White is about 552.5 years. The orbit resembles that of Eris.
Philip Sedgwick offers us preliminary keywords on his website http://www.philipsedgwick.com/, though he points out that they are by no means complete and will be revised as research continues. Establishing the astrological meaning of any planet is a long process.
Fairy tales resemble myths. They can have symbolic meanings, and often slightly different versions of the same story are told in different cultures. In the story of Snow White a beautiful maiden bites a poisoned apple, which was given to her by her evil stepmother. She falls into a deep sleep and is thought to be dead. Time passes, and a prince traveling through the land sees Snow White and falls in love with her. The prince takes her coffin with him. The movement causes a piece of poisoned apple to fly from Snow White’s mouth, so she awakens.
Snow White’s mock-death and transformation story is actually one version of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter’s daughter Persephone became the goddess of the underworld when Hades (Roman Pluto) abducted her from the earth and brought her into the underworld.
Persephone was freed, but during her captivity she had eaten pomegranate seeds, the food of the underworld, and was therefore forced to spend a part of each year in the underworld with her husband. For the other part, she is able to return to live with her mother on the earth.
The apple is an element that appears in various tales and myths all over the world. Eris was the Greek goddess of strife. She tossed into a party the apple of discord, addressed “to the fairest one,” thus provoking a quarrel between goddesses about the appropriate recipient.
In Norse mythology, the golden apples are the source of the god’s immortality and eternal youth. They are in the possession of the goddess Idunn. She is depicted as a young maiden who carries a basket full of apples. At the onset of the Ragnarök she sinks down into the roots of Yggdrasil (the tree of life) and disappears from the earth to reappear afterwards with new life.
English scholar H. R. Ellis Davidson notes a connection between fertility and apples in Norse mythology. She concludes that in the figure of Idunn “we must have a dim reflection of an old symbol: that of the guardian goddess of the life-giving fruit of the other world.”
The Scorpio New Moon is square to the triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune in Aquarius, drawing out the healing powers of the conjunction. We can safely give up on some effete patterns in our lives and start something new.
References:
Freya Aswynn, Northern Mysteries & Magick, Llewellyn Publications, 2006