Where are you going? Where do you want to go? I don’t mean Tahiti or London or back to bed for a nap. I mean: what kind of vision do you have for the way you walk in the world — your impact, your sense of your own presence, your spiritual/energetic and social footprints. I ask because today at 8:33 pm EDT, Mercury conjoins Mars in Taurus as we near an eclipse.
Simplified chart section, with Pluto in Capricorn at the top, Chiron in Pisces to the left, and the Taurus planets at the bottom (in order: Mars, Mercury, the lunar South node, the Sun, Pallas Athene and Venus). View glyph key here.
Mercury-Mars in Taurus more than just a concentration of mental drive, though you may feel it like that in your day-to-day movements. Mercury and Mars are part of a larger aspect denoting a rare opening — and all of it constitutes an important landmark along the on-ramp to Thursday’s astrologically impressive Taurus New Moon eclipse: itself a rare opening.
Today’s opening is formed by a very tight (within a few arc minutes) sextile from Mercury-Mars to Chiron in Pisces, along with Mercury-Mars trine Pluto in Capricorn (just past exact). They form an earth-water-earth triangle that’s all about flow: the easeful flow of the trine, and the two sextiles, which ask us to take a little initiative to catalyze the energy they offer. (Chiron and Pluto are also making a water-earth sextile to each other.)
In particular, the Taurus-Pisces connection integrates spiritual and visionary ideas into our values system.
And with Mercury-Mars at (or very near) the midpoint of Taurus, there is an alignment with the Aries Point. (The midpoints of fixed signs — Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius — share a special resonance with the early degrees of the cardinal signs: Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.)
The Aries Point is the sensitive area where personal and collective themes, ideas and events blend and intersect in compelling ways. Translation: the decisions we make today and through this week, in an effort to synthesize our spiritual/visionary ideas with our values, have some true potential to shape the world around us — at the same time that we take the helm of our own inner direction.
Making decisions about your values inwardly only matters if you allow those decisions to guide your actions outwardly. Otherwise, how can you claim them as values? Without a connection to and harmony with your actions, they are just ideas that you like.
In other words, this aspect pattern is about willful progressive decision-making, with the freedom to let go of what does not work (represented by the lunar South Node, the locus of Thursday’s eclipse) and integrate what does work (Chiron). Nobody has any excuse to claim being stuck at this point — the power of decision is right in your hands. You can think consciously and choose progress, which is the message of this aspect pattern.
The Aries Point resonance indicates that we can take this to the level of choosing together. Can you imagine what that might feel like? What might that look like?
As you formulate your vision, harness the heat, drive and agility of Mercury and Mars. In Taurus, they have some real determination that you can use — both to release what it’s time to release, and to put into action what is calling to be integrated. Part of the trick of formulating a vision and making decisions to support it is not getting hung up at the start with, “How will I do this? I don’t know all the steps!”
If inventors started with that question, nothing would ever get invented. Sometimes you have to see the big, brilliant picture first and fill in the steps to get there later, after you’ve committed energy and psychic space to it.
As luck would have it, even the astrology is spelling out that order of operations: the Sun is nearly conjunct asteroid Pallas Athene, which is about strategy. But even though they are functionally conjunct at the moment of Thursday’s eclipse, they’re not exactly conjunct until afterwards. The moment for planning your steps will come; but first, get your vision and your values in line, and get busy making choices. You know what is no longer serving you. You won’t disintegrate if you let it go; you’ll just be getting into the swing of things and opening up the space to choose again.
With additional writing by Eric Francis
