The Cancer/Capricorn axis is an axis of security, of all the ways that “safety” can exist. At a recent panel of organizers in Minneapolis (put on by Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation), Kandace Montgomery of the Black Visions Collective said this,
“I think we have to educate ourselves and get really critical about this false understanding of safety that the police have been given as a solution.. and then really start to grow our imagination about what does safety actually look like and what are all of the really nuanced and holistic ways that we get to come to that shared sense of safety?”
This eclipse asks us to reflect deeply, quietly, dreamily in this liminal place: What would true, beautiful safety look like?
Don’t forget that eclipses are not represented as monsters by accident. Sure, every eclipse dragon has its own personality. But whatever forces parade through us during peak eclipse activity, they leave us prone to physical and mental overwhelm.
This is not a time to actively petition the Sun or Moon with your waking seeds of intention. All that does is goad an ancient hungry dragon into paying more attention to you. You could say that eclipses obscure the bright light of our vitality under the reptilian shadow-thrashings of an otherworldly fate-amplifier.
Napping, dreaming, and keeping your head is absolutely encouraged.
In many overlapping ways, 2020 is an in-between place in the grand cycles of time. In-between places are the domain of the marginalized, and are literal and symbolic doorways for times of inconsistency. Eclipses are too.
On the Cancer side we find the emotional, primal comfort of the patterns of lineage – a place where trust and instinct and irrational levels of attachment get fed and also challenged. In Capricorn, the tangible systems that keep our structures stable. Brutality was never sound to begin with, so now we reckon.
Security can’t be forced. But here we are after centuries of brutal effort, with “security forces” as a normal turn of phrase. The crumbling hierarchies try to proclaim that the inertia of their violence is necessary. But the astrology of 2020 and beyond says, no. It’s absolutely not.
While some eclipses are mild, Saros Series 137 belongs to a group of dragons that are historically quite difficult. There is an imaginative quality to this series that astrologer Bernadette Brady connects to amplified individual delusions. We can all feel that there are blockages or restrictions, yet we’re prone to misjudging the true nature of what they entail. Rahu is not a truth-teller like the Sun. He’s a creature who obscures that impulse.
This eclipse lands squarely on the Summer Solstice, which is not quite as rare as it sounds but is still stark: a summer of Rahu is promised. For an eclipse that brings restrictions and blockages, the landscape of 2020 offers us a host of walls to rail against.
The push to dismantle all systems of oppression is appropriate, sensible, and overdue. Cancer urges us to define safety based on the most vulnerable. The crumbling hierarchies have marked Black babies as somehow a threat. They must think that Black trans women’s existence should trouble you – but if you knew the truth: that their empowerment and safety is the true measure of how alright all of us humans are going to be during the global struggles ahead, you’d help us tear the prisons down. And I hope that you do.
But for tonight, prioritize a sober dream-state and your rest.
Wishing you an almost unbearable amount of love.