How Enlightenment Arrives

Full moon at 2° of Sagittarius

A photo of a plane above Barcelona, that helps us to feel into the real size of a rainbow. From NurPhoto, via Structured Magazine.

Bright and early Thursday morning — May 23rd at 6:52am PT — the waxing moon will peak in fullness at 2° of Sagittarius, and just rest there looking shiny and holy and whole. Sagittarius is mutable fire, transformational fire, and it’s a kind of blazing, generous, high-spirited archetype associated with teachers and philosophers and saints. Its ruler is Jupiter, planet of expansion and generous resources, and together they create a kind of open, playful, enlightened state — the state we arrive at after we have come through an intense healing trial, a time of suffering, a difficult transformation, or the spiritual struggle of inner and outer wars. In Sagittarius, we get to occupy a kind of exalted consciousness for awhile. Fresh perspective, compassion, and understanding are just blooming like crazy. Our hearts and spirits are blooming like crazy. Like suddenly everything we have lived through is generating all this new awareness, and there’s a depth to it, and we feel compelled to update what we believe to be true, to coin new wisdom from our heartbreak and struggle, and to crystalize out of that wisdom new philosophies and approaches to life. The ultimate goal of Sagittarius is not just to expand the personal or individual consciousness, but to influence cultures or collective beliefs, ideally in the direction of Jupiter’s values of lovingkindness, generosity, and resources for all.

Full moons here tend to be pretty celebratory, as maybe you can feel. And this one is happening at the same time as a Jupiter Venus conjunction in Taurus, a signature of maximum beauty and goodness and groundedness and Jupiter’s final glory-making move in Taurus before it enters Gemini. It’s like a big fat beam of love light shining out, the big finish to this particularly generative few weeks of astrology. Something is now culminating that began in December on the new moon in Sagittarius, in the peak of the darkness, just before the Winter Solstice. We are now on the other side of the wheel, in the peak of the light. The season of Spring corresponds with the alchemical phase of citrinitas, the yellowing, or enlightening. It’s a phase of embodied epiphany when the opposites unite, the conscious and unconscious unite, producing nondual states and breakthroughs of fresh consciousness and realization. The understandings we have been longing for, the answers to our prayers, begin arriving in the form of direct transmissions from our higher/future Self. These realizations may be painful, there is famously a lot of pain and righteous anger involved in enlightenment and seeing things as there are. And these realizations may be joyful and relieving, enlightenment includes all of it, it includes the whole. The Sagittarius full moon is associated with this moment, as it always comes in the final month of spring, when the Sun is in Gemini, sign of the union of opposites, and the moon, the sun’s reflective opposite, is in Gemini’s opposite sign. It’s a full, unified chord of meaning, this moon.

So take some time in the coming days to gather and write down any insights that have arrived this spring, or are arriving now. Reflect on any intentions you set back on the new moon in Sagittarius or the Winter Solstice, what dreams you seeded or what growth or new forms you called in. Take stock of what has evolved from that seed or wish, and celebrate any and all signs of growth or progress towards your dreams. Commit to integrating and stabilizing this growth, to applying your insights in the coming months, and to making any changes you know you need to make. If you don’t do the work of integrating this healing, of stabilizing these insights and applying them meaningfully, you will have the same epiphanies next year at this time, and the next year, and so on, until you are ready to do so. Sometimes we just aren’t ready; it’s just not time yet, and that’s ok—there is an intelligence to our timing and unfolding. We can’t skip steps in our own individuation, and there may be major obstacles to still overcome, and further inner work to do to prepare for big outer change. This full moon is also the beginning of a current of liberation and release that can assist you in clearing your path further over the next six months, moving you closer to the transformation you seek.

One final thing to dream on. Sagittarius is represented by the centaur with the bow and arrow. In the Western mystery schools, this arrow is associated with the Temperance path on the Tree of Life, which is called The Path of the Arrow, and it crosses the Tower path, which is called the bowstring. When the tower begins to shake—when crisis erupts and our old way of living and being starts to crumble—it can be thought of as the bowstring being pulled back into a position that will shoot the arrow up the Tree into an exalted way of knowing. As the arrow is loosed, which happens as a result of working with and balancing existing polarities and opposites, they say that consciousness is raised into a realization of its cosmic origins and destiny. Pamela Eakins, creator of Tarot of the Spirit, writes, “This bow that propels us forward is Sagittarius’ bow, which is also associated with the rainbow, or the bow of promise.” In ancient Greece, the goddess Iris was both the guardian of this rainbow, and its embodiment. Iris served as a messenger for the gods, and was the female counterpart to Hermes. When ancients saw a rainbow, they believed they were witnessing Iris travelling between heaven and earth, connecting the higher and lower realms, to deliver a divine message to a mortal. I hope in the coming days, we all receive some visitations from Iris, some symbolic rainbows. I hope we receive any essential messages from our own higher selves, anything we are ready to see and hear and know. I hope that we can further become who we are here to become, for ourselves and for each other. I hope that we can be the fiery forces for change, for justice, for peace, for sanity, that this year calls us to be.

A 1979 rainbowing artwork by Kiyoshi Awazu (1929-2009)

Ritual & Writing Prompts

Below, for paid subscribers, inspiration and loose instructions for a fire ritual, making an agua florida, and writing some new work that helps you articulate new wisdoms.

(Disclaimer: Prompts are suggestions, not instructions. Play with what inspires you, ignore what’s doesn’t. Adapt in any way you see fit.)