Eclipse Lore

Why our world's biggest tipping point is written in blood on the moon

Eclipses should come with a similarly succinct warning. But even with all possible due diligence, this mad season oft gets the best of us. If everyone or everything is feeling chaotic, unsteady or hard simmering towards boil over, remember this gristle and grinding down is how we make the change eclipses always herald. Not one of us is immune to their sandpaper loving and violent reconfiguration. Fuck you, says the eclipse to the earth’s meat in its sandwich, I’m hardly going to do what you tell me.

Since trading animism for artificial intelligence, we have a dreadful tendency to both personalise and control the mighty forces of nature and control. Modern astrology treats the stars like everything else in this broken culture. One more convenient tool you can relentlessly consume and command rather than a map that you can trace through your body, or your life. Modern mysticism is no better foregoing the traditions it has regurgitated as millenial discovery. Artificial witches that draw wheels of a year they don’t actually plant themselves into. Dilute and replace ingredients and wonder why the ritual won’t rise like it is supposed to. Everyone says they know eclipses to be periods of change that ripple. But how willing are you for your life - and this bad old world - to truly be eclipsed? For things to actually change you will have to give up more than constant gain.

So can you feel that ratchet? The pressure? The squeeze?
Did you wake up crying or raging?
Have you slumped into despair or despondency?
Is your head or heart clanging with memories and nostalgia, old slights and past hurts?
Is the weight of your grief so dense that it feels like moving through quicksand?

Even without whatever happened in the news this morn, this is the dubious magic of the lunar version of the species. She whose rising tightens everything, whose painful contractions force us to confront or relinquish that which cannot live peacefully within. Denialists will continue to squirm uncomfortably at tables they refuse to leave.

We are not supposed to hold pain or weight, stuff and nonsense or the whole screaming teeming world perpetually. We are beautifully designed to be able to move through anything developing resilience as we go. Regardless this oh so modern world is trying to make you forget you know how. Collapsing frequency and applying even greater pressure. Demanding you relinquish your humanity for its ease and convenience. Separating you from ritual and reckoning, the kind that lets you navigate collapse knowing that rebirth is on the other side of every single big and little death.

Winona Ryder in Heathers, 1988

Every lunar eclipse demands a sacrifice but not in the give me your first born way that cannibalises intention. Sacrifice does not only mean having to give something up you feel like you might die without, or are not ready to leave behind. Yet. As I was talking about in last weekend’s Eclipse Salon sacrifice comes to us from the Latin word sacrere which means to hold sacred. Much like surrender and devotion, modern weaponising of words deliberately muddies meaning in an effort to alter their spell. The root always gives us the truth, no matter how long it has been buried. The Virgo blood moon asks you to give up the profane for all that you still hold sacred - and then build your future solely upon it.

Your secret sacrificial power lies in discernment, an internal barometer that reads life for you and guides you in line with your soul’s codex. Many a mystic can read this but none can know it the way you do. Innate wisdom speaks to us through intuition and vision as much as it does through feeling, sensation and nervous system activations that keep us safe. But when this human ability gets targeted and our attention is farmed daily into outrage or despair, frequency collapses by design. Then it is all too easy to give up, check out or fall into despondency. So we are also crossing this bridge of sighs with the old world constantly taking pot shots at us from within the systems it built to consume us.

Justice does not require self-destruction.
You are allowed to survive this intact.
That is part of the rebellion too.
~ @themamattorney

The truth is since that last eclipse in February just a fucked up fortnight ago - and all you may have secretly wanted it to change, stand and deliver to you - life has shown you everything that remains in the way of it. If the Aquarian chime is seeding all our futures, do not overlook Pluto’s presence settled in now beyond those psychedelic gates. The dark lord knows there is no coming to our bright future without reckoning with the shadows of the past and the world we all came from. Mostly what we have occulted is how partiarchy is still on the decks deep inside us, refusing the blind spot and what it takes to extract its vile humours from ours. Each of us have been making this crossing since Saturn and Pluto bumped uglies and collapsed the world with viral pandemonium in 2020. We are hopefully somewhere along this suspension bridge, even as it swings and baulks. Making the crossing separately and together from the bad old times to something entirely unformed. Its shape to be determined by the unique steps we take and the intentions we hold as we gingerly step forward.

Ancient eastern star lore frames our soul’s journey each life from the dragon’s tail to the dragon’s head. These beginning and end points are the nodes of the moon forming up our eclipses due to the regularly looping alignment of earth, sun and moon. The tail is our past; where we have come from, what we think we know, the way the stage was set when we made our grand entrance. The dragon’s head is an orientation point, a journey our soul has the map to and constantly seeks out. That space in between? This is your life. We don’t trade one for the other. We slipstream between the two. Eclipses are focus points that light up the world and its shadows. The space between them - the path we have been treading for near on a fortnight - is as rife with danger as it is ripe with possibility.

In the relative luxury of the West and its galling first world problems, we sidestep evolution as often as we do anarchy. We do so because we comfortably can. Because our lives don’t depend on it, yet. Because we have not lost enough, hurt enough, done enough to realise that we are not cosseted by imperial power. Individualism and hierarchy all suckle from the same power teat: patriarchy. And it devours all its children eventually. So here we all are screaming into caption boxes while remaining too stuck in our ways, defined by our darkest hidden histories, attached and unwilling to let go.

Since time immemorial eclipses are having none of that shit. They will hassle you, hussle you, force your hand. Everyone else’s too. They will ensure forward motion by unmercifully severing that umbilicus and leaving you to learn how to survive on the other side of suckling. They facilitate verdant growth but you are unlikely to be feeling that as much as the pruning at this stage of the game.

Not everyone is across this, darklings which is what happens when you outsource your spirit work to an LLM or its hapless handler. Many will be Chicken Little-ing through your world today, angry at everything going wrong, secretly terrified by the horrors and what it means for them. Those desperate for ways to save themselves are complletely willing to throw anyone else under the bus. Flat earthers certain they’re too close to a deadly tipping point refusing out of the box thinking. Preppers snapping up most of the toilet paper and pasta. Muggles are losing the tiny minds they steadily refuse to change. Panic making them all even more dangerous.

Art by lucy-anne-creative

So what does your friendly neighbourhood witch actually do when the sky is glitching and eclipses are rolling through our world? Witches go to ground. We follow the lead of nature which stills and goes quiet when a lunar eclipse zone opens. Ritual becomes a vast architecture that holds you and keeps you through all kinds of sky weather and man made storms. This is not about spell casting or quite frankly fucking with far mightier forces at play, and most practicing witches learn that the hard way as part of the initiation into the crooked path. It is nothing more magical than late stage hubris to think of hurling yourself and your clickbait cash funnel through this stargate. You could instead just try to keep your hand on your lever and trust the course you are on. Don’t let anyone else operate your machinery. Always remember that your evolution is a self paced work from home inside job. You are never required to submit your spiritual WIP to anything refusing theirs in a self generated cloud of ascension.

The antidote to any astrological malaise is often found in its opposite. This is particularly interesting when you consider both the fresh elemental and seasonal lenses of this eclipse, let alone the crowded cosmic choreography. Surrender is the secret salve to chaos if you can trust in the deeper currents of your life and let yourself be drawn over these thresholds by them. The nitpicky Virgo eclipse is balmed by its Pisces stellium, aiding the dissolution and the float through. Pisces is after all the sign that knows best that the antidote to anything and everything is to be like water.

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
~ Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Tonight’s blood moon will be a spectacular sight and the last total lunar eclipse until 2029. This too is a wonder of our world when you are standing beneath it. Visible to most of the world if the night timing is right, you can find your timezone here. Listed below is the lunar eclipse info for Sydney (AEDT) on the third of the third.

Penumbral Eclipse begins: 7:44 pm
Partial Eclipse Begins: 8.50pm
Colour starts to shift at this point

Blood Moon
Total Eclipse Begins: 10.04pm
Eclipse Maximum: 10:33pm
Virgo full moon at 10.37pm
Total Eclipse Ends: 11.02pm
Colour drains now like blood off the moon

Partial Eclipse Ends: 11.27pm
Penumbral Eclipse Ends: 1:23am

That’s five hours and thirty nine minutes that you can neither control nor petition at your peril. It is also nearly six hours of surrendering to the mighty forces that compel our world in the direct path of their remarkable syzygy.

If you do nothing else tonight darklings, please look up in wonder. Perhaps then the eclipse will whisper sweet nothings in your ear as she deftly takes all that you cannot give up to save yourself.

Catch you on the flipside,
Kerrie xo

Eclipse Resources

Lunar Eclipse Salon // Virgo Blood Moon
The full glittering cacophony, astrology and eclipse lore for the Virgo blood moon & an imaginal journey to float us all over its glitching threshold // 95 minute video & I’ve just dropped the price to a cuppa so you can enjoy it pre-eclipse.

Imaginal Meditation up now in The Channel to soothe any frayed eclipse nerves (16 minutes) free for subscribers

We are Blood Mooning it up in the Coven Electric with all the ritual architecture to do a lot or as little as you like while eclipsing. Our Coven is built as spiritual support salon so it does not require you to wear the pointy hat anymore than give up the rosary beads. Witchcraft is just one more word for staying connected to nature and its cycles in a way that reliably underpins all the stupid shit mankind does on top of it. Damn handy for the revolutionary arsenal.

March Witch’s Calendar gives you the hats up before the astrology takes you out like a fifty foot screamer, which is why it’s included at the start of every month as part of all my paid Patreon tiers. Knowledge is power, better delivered as foresight than hind.

And of course this witch and my vast retinue of remedy and care. If this mad season has you wildly in its clutches, reach out. Sessions all this weekend from Friday to craft uncommon sense from your ‘clipse crazy. Book in via the website or send me a raven.