How are you feeling on this Aquarius Full Moon? How is your body experiencing its relationship with the environment? Who is your heart reaching out to connect with? What collection of thoughts do you want to bring more attention to? Who/what are you inspired to co-create with, to collaborate with?
How are you feeling on this Aquarius Full Moon? How is your body experiencing its relationship with the environment? Who is your heart reaching out to connect with? What collection of thoughts do you want to bring more attention to? Who/what are you inspired to co-create with, to collaborate with?
There are so many components to who we are, so many aspects of self and society interwoven, so many parts that break open into so many more parts, all of which keep weaving together the whole.
Aquarius is an archetype that wants to bring together a community, a visionary who sees the interconnectedness of all that exists, and the importance of listening to many voices.
What voices within you do you hear?
Who else do you listen to?
What aspects of you do you tend to leave in the dark?
What aspects of society do you push away?
In ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile happened in July/August, during the season when the sun was in Leo. This is when the constellation of Aquarius rises around sunset. This is when the moon is full in Aquarius.
The Nile, according to ancient Egyptians, was Osiris himself; god of dismemberment and resurrection, breaking down and re-emerging, with death and rebirth. When the Nile was flooded, it was believed to be Osiris fertilizing the land, who was the Goddess Isis herself.
We go deep into the story of Isis and Osiris in the Lughnasadh Somatic Ceremony, which is created to support and inspire your body, mind, heart, and creativity during this season as we transition from Summer’s peak toward the Fall. Check out all the details here.
For ancient Egyptians, Aquarius was the power of life’s renewal, pouring out of the two vases of god Hapi, at the (symbolic, not actual) top of the Nile. Hapi was an androgynous figure – a male with a big belly, large breasts, and a beard. Symbol of fertility and fecundity and the richness of the earth, Hapi was often depicted carrying food and pouring water out of two jugs. Hapi connected symbolically the upper and lower parts of Egypt, through the flow of the Nile.
This gender fluid character invites us to remember that we are always more than one thing, that we are each an interwoven being of complementing and contradicting qualities, that life is complex, ambiguous, and layered, that there is always more than one side to the story.
If we roar with Leo’s call to be courageous, and carry the water of the collective the way that Aquarius teaches us to do, who might we become on a personal level, and where might we move collectively? If we step into the spotlight with Leo, only to keep moving the spotlight around with Aquarius, what could we learn together and on our own?
Out of the four fixed signs (Leo, Scorpio, Taurus, and Aquarius), Aquarius was the only one depicted by humans.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we see a transition from a matriarchal society, which had an anthropomorphic vision, into a patriarchal one, that becomes more and more anthropocentric. The king replaces the goddess. She fights, but eventually goes underground. She’s still here though, reminding us to be less stuck in one form, and more adaptable. When he goes looking for the herb of immortality, she sends a bull (Taurus) to fight him. He must also deal with a pride of lions (Leo), as well as a scorpion-man (Scorpio) who guards a gate he must pass.
The herb of immortality is protected by the Sumerian/Babylonian version of Noah – an Aquarius figure who hears a divine voice warning him of a huge flood. He builds a boat, survives, and is rewarded for his ability to listen to divinity.
The patriarchy, modernity, and colonialism are obsessed with preserving, with trying to achieve immortality. The goddess isn’t busy with immortality. She knows that life is cyclical. She knows that growth must end in decay, in order for rebirth to happen.
In Greek mythology, Hebe, daughter of Hera, who pours the nectar of the gods into their cups, is replaced by a masculine character, Ganymede, who is a beautiful shepard boy, lusted for by Zeus. Here too, the feminine is replaced by the masculine.
The history of the Aquarius archetype shows us a transition from gender fluid to gender fixed, from goddess to king, from matriarchy to patriarchy, from cyclical to linear.
Aquarius, who is a disruptor of the status quo, an agent of change, and a forward thinker, an innovative, imaginative power, calls us to question our relationship with life and death, with death and rebirth, with our ideas about immortality and preservation of self.
This phase in the season invites us to enter the peak of growth, the fullness of what we have manifested, and to begin to move toward decay, toward release of form, and into the capacity to transform as things break down and begin to become other things.
The Lughnasadh Somatic Ceremony is a journey into this process of building, breaking down, and restructuring, into the simultaneity of celebration and grief, into the power of life which is never without death. Join us for this magical, creative, inspirational, transformative experience; an embodied ritual and a mythopoetic exploration.
Check out this FREE Aquarius Full Moon video.
Read this article by Jana Astanov about this powerful full moon.
And read this essay I wrote about Lughnasadh published in Creatrix magazine.
May we carry the waters of change courageously, breathe into our collective heart, break down the structures that keep us confined and stuck, listen to voices that enrich our vision, not only ones that support it, and include dissolution in our creative endeavors.
Happy Lughnasadh and happy full moon to you!