We don’t often get a New Moon so close to New Year’s Eve. So you may be noticing a stronger-than-usual resonance today with the themes of ending one cycle and beginning another one, as the Capricorn New Moon is exact at 5:27 pm EST today. If you’ve been feeling a little low-energy as you consider your plans for Dec. 31, the lunar cycle corroborates that.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re still waiting for noticeable changes in the length of daylight. The weather is generally colder. Where I live, we’re a good couple months from obvious signs of growth outdoors. Nature is still underscoring one of Capricorn’s primal themes: to conserve. You may feel that especially strongly today and tomorrow, whether in terms of physical energy, material resources, money, or even emotional labor.
Although the Moon has already begun its waxing phase as it separates from the Sun, we still won’t be able to see it in the sky for another day or two. Energetically that is a nice form of correspondence with January 1, especially since the Moon will enter Aquarius at 5:49 am Wednesday. We’ll begin this New Year with a growing Moon in a new sign.
As encouraging as that is, I know a good number of people who are feeling apprehensive about 2025, and have been since November. The cusp of change is typically not an easy edge to ride, especially when we don’t feel empowered to direct the process in a substantial way. (I believe strongly in the power of collective effort, yet sometimes even that can feel out of reach.)
On an individual, personal scale accessing authority over the changes in our lives is frequently an inside job. I’m talking about how we can recognize and name the internalized voices that keep us stuck; the ones that whisper, “this is the way it’s always been, and this is all that can be done.”
Once seen and named for what these voices are — the words, expectations, and energetic/emotional imprints of parents, early caregivers, teachers, whole communities, and even distant ancestors — we can start the process of shifting how we relate to the unconscious stories, beliefs, and patterns that keep us dancing to a tune that is not entirely our own.
I bring this up for a couple of reasons. One is that popular catchphrases like, “New Year, new me!” do us a great disservice with their superficial simplicity. Nothing actually changes except the page on the calendar at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31. Even when actively taking new steps, we’re starting from where already we are.
The other reason relates to the chart for today’s New Moon. It’s an interesting one!
The Sun and Moon are conjunct in the 10th degree of Capricorn (9 degrees and 44 arc minutes of Capricorn). Right in that same degree of Cap are:
– Asteroid Lilith: associated in part with themes of decisions, selection and rejection, and also the disowned and repressed powers of the feminine (especially where these have been denied by society)
– Centaur object Pholus: associated with runaway reactions, small causes with big effects, and ancestral patterns (particularly around alcohol)
– Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) Quaoar: named for a creation deity of the Tongva people who sang and danced the other gods and goddesses into existence; associated with the emotional rhythm and chaos of the family line into which we are born
Exactly square the Sun and Moon is the asteroid Arachne in Libra. Named for the mortal in Greek myth who boasted that her weaving was better than the goddess Athena’s, Arachne relates to networks and webs, and the stories we weave (among other themes).
Exactly square the Sun and Moon and opposite Arachne is the TNO Salacia, in Aries. This object was named after the nymph of calm waters in Roman myth. She avoided Neptune’s amorous advances until he sent a dolphin messenger to find her, then they married and she was promoted to goddess of calm seas.
Although her name comes from the root for “salt” and does not share a root with the word “salacious” (which means ” having or conveying undue or inappropriate interest in sexual matters,”) my former astrology mentor did correlate Salacia’s entry into Aries (with Chiron) with the rise of the “Me Too” movement. He saw this as describing our society on the cusp of a desperately needed honest conversation (and healing) around sexuality. There may also be something about her mythical elusiveness that is relevant.
When it comes to minor objects in astrology, sometimes their names can “stand in” for concepts that they were not actually named for if they sound and look very similar. (Astrology, after all, is not a science — it’s an interpretive art) So the Salacia/salacious connection is on the interpretation table even though it is not a factual fit.
Finally, roughly two degrees from the New Moon in Capricorn is the asteroid Pallas — relating to strategy in war, diplomatic craft, and wisdom. Pallas Athena was the goddess who sprang fully formed and armored from Zeus’s forehead in myth.
So how does this all fit together?
First, consider that the sign Capricorn relates to family systems: the first “structure” we get to know as children, full of traditions and rules and hierarchies. Extrapolated out, those family systems evolve into the corporate and governmental forms that shape so much of society.
As I noted above, a lot of people working together can create change on a collective scale. Individual change is more in our immediate power, but often involves first hearing more clearly the inherited voices that guide us: the song we were born into, how we dance to it, and the many ways it ripples out in our lives with outsized effects. (Quaoar and Pholus, which are in a long conjunction in Capricorn stretching from 2018 to 2063.)
Once we hear those inner voices and begin noticing these steps we’ve been dancing along with, we have some decisions to make (Lilith). Which voice is our own? Which internalized voices do we keep, and which do we reject?
The fact of your ancestry is set in stone. However, its song and its dance are open to adjustment and healing. It begins with a concerted effort to become conscious of it.
That is a choice. You can choose to look for ways to heal how it has played out in your life. Taking such steps will modify the ancestral dance in profound ways.
Along the way, we become aware of the stories we have woven in response to our family’s dance and structure. Arachne in Libra asks what it would mean to bring your story into better balance. Would it entail unraveling the threads of the family tapestry, to be able to see each more clearly in relation to your own?
What might you be able to build or weave even better as a result?
Pallas in this configuration seems to suggest being strategic and concrete in this effort. What would it mean to be conservative yet active? Maybe it’s about making the smallest tangible step that will offer a result; trusting that efficient use of energy may ripple out more than you expect.
Salacia has been tough for me to parse in this New Moon chart, perhaps partly because I do not think its delineation is quite solid yet. Sex does not feel like a prominent theme in this chart, though of course sex is how we all get born into the family dance of Capricorn.
However, I noticed that Salacia’s location, at 9+ Aries, is the exact degree of the second spring eclipse in 2025, roughly three months from now on March 29. That will be two weeks after the first eclipse and about a week after the equinox. Although those markers mean nothing for the civil calendar, they are key moments in the astrological calendar.
Something about Salacia in this degree of Aries feels like an elusive enticement forward, or a messenger from the future.
Perhaps keep that in mind as you review all that you have learned in 2024 and consider your intentions for the New Year; as you separate those threads and envision new ways to weave them, or sing them, or dance them — even in the face of uncertainty, hierarchical power, and the potential dismantling of known structures.
There may yet be a path to calmer inner seas amidst the chaos of whatever we collectively are birthing.
That path may be elusive. Watch out for the joyful, dolphin-like messengers.
With love,
Amanda
P.S. If I can support you through the current changes and uncertainty with an astrological consultation or some soul work sessions, please get in touch. And if you enjoy these horoscopes or find them helpful, you’re welcome to leave me a tip here as a form of energy exchange. Thank you for reading!
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