Activating The Oracular Mode
New moon at 24° of Gemini
Live Gathering This Sunday/Tomorrow
A reminder! You’re invited to join me tomorrow for the last live gathering of spring. Sunday, June 14th from 3pm-5pm PT I’ll be hosting a hangout on Zoom for paid subscribers, just hours before the new moon in Gemini is exact. We will be tuning in live to the new energies of Uranus in Gemini, talking about poetry as a liberation technology and spell craft, and then we will do a little writing together and a little talking about it all. Think of it as a pregame ritual for your own private new moon practice, where you can enter the electric field of the new moon in a state of connecting and writing and talking and radically listening, as Gemini would have it. All paid subscribers will receive a link to join tomorrow. Come if you want to and can!
This new moon in Gemini
At 7:54pm PT on the of evening of Sunday, June 14th, the moon goes dark and renews herself at 24° of Gemini, Zodiac sign of the Twins, or Lovers. Gemini is our mutable air sign. It’s a part of us that is adaptable, flexible, changeable, in ongoing forever process. Its ruler is our mercurial mental magician planet Mercury, who else? And as an air sign ruled by Mercury, Gemini activates through our conscious attention, our breath and speech, our constantly shifting awareness. If Gemini is not changing its mind, just give it a minute; it will. It’s not built for conclusion and certainty. It enters the world through it curiousness, its wonder. It considers all information potentially interesting and all knowledge provisional. It needs to learn and discover. It needs to stay fascinated, and be allowed and free to follow the current of what’s fascinating. It fundamentally can’t get stuck. I would go so far as to say that Gemini is how we learn; it is how we change our mind; it’s how we rearrange the memory and story furniture, in the inner rooms of understanding. It’s also how we avoid the risk of over-prioritizing stability. We need stability and groundedness, of course, but the world we live in is alive and constantly changing, so we also really need to be able to destabilize intelligently, to adapt and respond. We need to want to expand out of our comfort zones. That’s the only way we will survive, collectively. That’s how we heal and grow and individuate. That’s how the great epic of journey of life unfolds—through the dance of change.
In the northern hemisphere, Gemini is the final sign of spring, and it rules the transition from spring into summer. In the natural world, it’s a very fertile, flowery time. The work of pollination is underway, the serious play of mating and sex is happening, the buzzing and birdsong is everywhere. Life is thriving through the undeniable dynamics of attraction and seeking. Without this stage, the next cohort of life can’t happen, the fruits and seeds and baby birds to eat the fruits and seeds can’t be born. In the psychological or alchemical dimension, this is the stage when fresh consciousness is created, life-changing epiphanies are minted. It’s the crowning achievement of the citrinitas to finally see something you did not see before, that you were not ready to see before, and then for that seeing or insight to come with a clear call for change—and, hopefully, a willingness to pursue that change. Insight at this stage is not purely reflective or intellectual; it’s visceral, embodied knowing. The ascension energies of spring are building up to this, and once we’ve arrived at our moment of enlightenment, our transformation is basically complete. The hermetic vessel breaks open, we are kicked out of the chrysalis for good, for now, and we’re sent out into the world of summer to live in our new form and grow into it properly. Gemini holds both ends of this process inside of it—the height of spring and the beginning of summer; the magic of arriving to a peak experience or fresh insight and being exhilarated by it, and the need to almost immediately move on from it, to not get stuck in it, to go live and explore and seek more.
All of this tells us about what the new moon in Gemini needs. Definitely some fresh scenery, some freedom to change it up, some permission to get a little strange and fractal. Depending on where we are at, we might need a reset of our mind and attention, a break from taking in any more information or stimulation. We might really need to get out of our heads a bit, shake off any stuck or looping stories or thought patterns. We might need to physically get loose and untrapped in the body, and watch how that works to get us looser and more untrapped in the mind. If the mind actually feels pretty rested—amazing—then the reset we might need is more like time meandering around our life and immediate environment in beginner’s mind. We might want to play with not knowing anything for a moment, and just re-entering that sweet space of agenda-free discovery. Like, if you didn’t have to do anything, what would you do? And then do that, and then the next thing you feel like doing, and then the next thing. See what unfolds. We just had a very powerful full moon in Sagittarius two weeks ago, where we were all called into a conference with our big picture, our soul purpose, our individuation destination, and we may have received a little more insight into that then we’ve had before. We don’t need to let that insight go—we should definitely keep our larger intentions and sense of direction and purpose in mind—but Gemini wisdom wants us hold that knowing very lightly. It wants us to know it, remember it, then return to the present moment, to begin again from there.
This particular new moon is getting extra charged by exciting, brand new conditions. This is the first new moon in Gemini with Uranus on deck, and so there’s some birthday party/inauguration/kick-off vibes, for Uranus’ 7 year transit here. It might feel sparky and sparkly for some of us. And some of us might be in a beginning that feels more like a crisis, and that’s real: all beginnings are in some way a crisis. Uranus is known as The Great Awakener. It’s the first planet beyond Saturn, and so it’s stationed beyond the limits of this world. Its energies are “out there,” and it connects us with parts of us, parts of the universe, that we might not know yet. Its job is to breakup old ground and deliver new worlds. Its transmissions tend to be sudden, shocking, sometimes bewildering, they reveal and dash our expectations. I believe it was Miyazaki who said, “In order to grow you must betray your expectations.” We can get more comfortable working with Uranus, in ways that make its energies less of a shock to the system, by developing our own intuitive function, but even then, it will still stay a little wild to work with. Uranus operating in Gemini, I think you can feel it, is extra wild. Partly it’s that this combination of Gemini’s communication genius with Uranus intuition lightning is undeniably a little ecstatic and oracular. It’s also that we just made it through 7 years of Uranus moving through Taurus, which slowed it down significantly, but also amplified its destabilizing effect. Gemini will not be slowing Uranus down. If you’ve been noticing things moving faster, momentum building for big changes, that’s connected to this. Strangely, this faster speed of developments might, for now, feel more stabilizing than the slower speed fall-apart of Uranus in Taurus.
Uranus is still only at 2° of Gemini, and it is in a close-and-getting-closer supportive trine with Pluto, currently at 5° of Aquarius. They are still at the beginning of their respective transits, and they have a long way to go, and their collaboration might not be noticeable in the day-to-day. But over time, they are working on a massive transformation in the air territories of consciousness. If we could see the world to come, we would not recognize it, that’s all we can know right now. So that’s adding so much tangible potency and significance to this new moon. I can also a feel a specific challenge coming through them, to be open to greater freedom than we are used to experiencing or using or believing we have. To trust some wilder currents and storylines. To sense the new forms that want to come through that are, in themselves, liberating. The Pluto Uranus exact trine will be on November 29th of this year, at 3° of Gemini, just 5 days after the full moon at 2° of Gemini, when the current of manifestation now beginning will culminate. So what we start now is connected to that moment, it will be pulled forward by an especially strong Fate magnet.
Gemini’s ruler Mercury is currently at 17° Cancer, where it’s been hanging out with both Venus and Jupiter, who’ve been making out in Cancer’s final degrees since we entered the month of June. So technically, the new moon’s ruler can’t see the Moon—in astrology, we say that events in neighboring signs or houses have a hard time seeing each other, like it would be hard for you to see something happening directly next to you, as opposed to in front of you. But of all the planets, Mercury is less troubled by those kinds of limitations and boundaries. It’s a shapeshifter and a translator and a mover-between-worlds. It doesn’t need a direct line of sight to the Moon to be in contact with the Moon. It feels like Mercury in Cancer is in the future—it’s in the sign where the Sun is about to go, a week from now on the Summer Solstice. It’s also going to spend a lot of the summer in Cancer, it’s going to retrograde there, and is already in the shadow zone of that retrograde. So the future it’s in is also a particularly reflective future. Mercury in watery, nurturing, feelings-steeped Cancer is already very intuitive. A Mercury retrograde in Cancer is likely going to be extremely nostalgic. So it’s giving this new moon some of that mix—enhanced intuition, communications arriving on feelings, future-sensing but also nostalgic and past-sensing. The perfect support for this activation of a new mode here in Gemini, the one connected the Uranus transit. The next 7 years will radically transform how we “think,” making that rational function far more irrational and sensing and intuitive. And that process begins now, on this new moon.
Over all, as this new moon has gotten closer, I’ve just been feeling it radiate this kind of like freebee slot machine energy. Like the new moon wants us to come put a few gold coins in the cosmic time machine, just for funsies. It wants us to pull the lever on the future. There are big winnings ahead. Not material winnings; these winnings are decidedly spiritual. But they will benefit us here on the material plane. I strongly suggest you take some time to play with this energy this weekend and especially at the start of the week. Talk. Write. Draw. Meditate. Clear the line of any static. Retune until you find a clear enough signal. Then listen in. Listen out. Listen to the future. Listen to the present. Reflect back what you think you’re hearing. Notice what resonates. The future is already here, it’s a little bit already here, and your own voice can sense it if you let it. What would surprise and delight you most if it happened? What’s the weirdest, best plot twists you can imagine for your personal life, for our collective? How free would you have to get to enjoy those twists and turns? How supported would you have to be to live the life of your ancestors wildest dreams? What if life were conspiring to communicate its most delicious and desirable secrets to you? Secrets you are uniquely designed to hear and understand and pass on? What if we all nailed it in this life, and the next, and the next? What fresh heavens can be created?
Ritual & Writing Prompts
And now the regular extras for paid subscribers: shortcut links to the archive of Gemini writings in In the River of What’s Happening Now, some journal prompts and specific suggestions for ritually working with the last new moon of spring and this brand new Uranus energy, and a creative writing prompt brought to you by Gemini’s conversational gifts.
