Total solar eclipse Aries
If your inbox is anything like mine, you’ve been deluged with eclipse emails from astrologers, mystics, astronomy bloggers and even the venerable New York Times!
Make no mistake: This isn’t a slow news week. This eclipse isn’t a load of pop-hype. It’s actually a biggie.
Eclipses are always notable because they’re associated with the element of surprise. But this one, a total solar eclipse, could be seriously game-changing—for you personally and the collective.
What’s visible in the sky on Monday, April 8 at 2:21pm EDT will likely be very cool for the tens of thousands of people who will observe it by luck of geography or dint of planned travel.
But the mega-momentousness of the event derives less from the Moon overshadowing the Sun for a few minutes than how you choose to invoke and implement the energy for the rest of the year.
Sun-Moon-Chiron (& more)!
Solar eclipses, by definition, occur when the luminaries (the Sun and Moon) align at the same point in the sky and within approximately 19º of the lunar nodes. Eclipses come in pairs (solar, or New Moon, and lunar, or Full Moon, which we last experienced on March 25), and we usually get two sets a year.
Because the lunar north node is in Aries and the south is in Libra for roughly 18 months, the current eclipse cycle is happening when the Sun is in one of those signs. That’s to be expected.
What’s exceptional about this eclipse is that Chiron, the centaur-asteroid associated with core wounds and transcendental healing, will be at the exact same degree and minute as the Sun-Moon: 19º Aries 24'.
On top of that: The (true) north node is less than 4º away, Venus is at 4º Aries, and Mercury (retrograde) and Eris, the female warrior planet, will also be partile-conjunct at 24º Aries, adding more activating energy to whatever gets stirred up. And all those planets are squaring Earth Mother asteroid (or dwarf planet) Ceres at 17º Capricorn 50.
That's not all, folks… Jupiter is closing in on Uranus for their Great Conjunction on April 20, and speedy Mars will catch steadfast Saturn on Wednesday as Pluto slows down, preparing to station retrograde on May 2 before making its final ten-week dip into Capricorn for another 200-plus years.
Even if you don’t understand the significance of all that, you probably sense it’s not business as usual.
There’s almost too much to unpack, and plenty of wise, grounded astrologers are talking it up on the socials. I don’t feel the need to add to that. But there is one thing that I’d love to share with you, especially if you believe in personal power and taking responsibility for your life.
How to manifest magic now
There are two good ways to work with this eclipse. One has to do with the “mundane,” or universal energy it symbolizes. The other is very personal: what these planets touch, or stimulate, in your own chart.
On the mundane level, people are all atwitter about disturbances brought on by nature and humankind: wars, attacks, earthquakes and other climatic events, politicking and of course, the never-happy news of the world.
People have been trepidatious about eclipses for thousands of years because they didn’t have the astronomical knowledge to understand they're natural, and predictable, occurrences. Modern man is more sophisticated in some ways, but we still succumb to fear around eclipses.
When we do, especially on a chronic basis, our brains—and nervous systems—become compromised. Even when we think we’re being smart and self-protective, we literally lose the ability to make wise decisions. To understand it neurologically, Google “amygdala and the cerebral cortex.”
Chiron is a misunderstood planetoid. People call him the wounded healer, but I take exception to that sobriquet. Chiron is more like a portal, traveling as it does between Saturn, ruler of the material world, and Uranus, the gateway to higher dimensions and expanded states of consciousness.
We all have Chiron in our charts, therefore we all have some “core wound.” Of course we do: We were children once, we had parents, and we all experienced some kind of mild or brutal trauma. That doesn’t mean we’re “wounded”; it means we’re human.
When Chiron is strong natally or when it’s activated—and when we're ready on an evolutionary level—we will attract or create experiences that trigger our personal trauma-narrative. And that's the moment the real work, the highest healing, begins.
In my four decades of working with clients, it’s only in the past five years, really, that the drive to become self-aware, heal and transcend the very notion of “victimhood” has become this prevalent.
While it can be painful to witness so much suffering, at the same time, it’s heartening to see so many people tuning into this awareness and shifting into the frequency of responsibility and healing, from which is born non-attachment and joy.
To me, that's the greatest promise of this eclipse. Aries is the first sign, the action taker. For better and worse, Aries puts Aries first. Aries can be a bastard, but it knows itself and seeks to fulfill its needs. If we can do that and still love and be tolerant of others, that’s a tremendous teaching: the old oxygen mask cliché.
But don’t ignore the south node in Libra, reminding us that what we get to mulch and uplevel is the limiting belief that we need others’ approval or permission to act. Take it from this Libra stellium: The people-pleasing path is a dead end.
So here’s where the magic comes in. Mercury retrograde is inviting us to pause and tap the brake on Aries’ impulsivity and reconsider what our life purpose actually is (the Eris conjunction).
The Sun-Moon-Chiron triad is helping us align our ego expression and emotions and desires with the healing of our traumas (what makes us us) in a way that supports our soul’s intention for this lifetime. Aries provides the courage to stretch outside our comfort zones, which is to say our self-constructed traps.
If you have planets or points between 19º and 20º of the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), you will have more direct access to this energy. The chart holds the clues; it’s different for everyone because of both the planetary positions and your evolutionary “status.”
I truly believe this eclipse has the potential to be a “get out of jail free” wild card. Step out of ordinary reality for a day. Defy convention. Stop playing small. Take a chance on something you deeply care about. Dust off your superhero cape and do something “impossible.”
And remember, you don’t need approval or permission—only the inextinguishable desire that’s always been there.
