Our third and final eclipse of this season is happening this weekend.
Before exploring this upcoming lunar eclipse, let's take a look at some gorgeous imagery that has come in from this recent solar eclipse, visible over Asia.
Solar Eclipse Review
Below is a photo taken aboard the International Space Station as it was orbiting over the Kazakhstan-China border area.
Below is a composite of photos taken by NASA's EPIC camera aboard the DSCOVR spacecraft, which is orbiting Earth in such a way that it has a continuous view of the sunlit side.
Below is a ground level composite of the eclipse sequence, as seen from Hong Kong, facing northwest in the afternoon. From this vantage point, the Sun is progressing down (westward) while the Moon is progressing up (eastward).
Below is a diagram showing the visible path of the eclipse in red, with a blue dot added for Hong Kong and blue arrow showing the northwest facing direction of the photo above.
Also, the Wikipedia page for the solar eclipse has more great photos!
Lunar Eclipse of July 4th/5th, 2020
Below is a visibility map for the upcoming lunar eclipse.
For folks on the West Coast of North America, the eclipse will be visible during moonrise, where the East Coast will have night time visibility. In the U.K., the eclipse will be visible at moonset. Although since it's a penumbral lunar eclipse, there will only be slight dimming. No reddening like a total lunar eclipse.
Horoscope
The eclipse will occur at 10 degrees out from the Jupiter-Pluto end of the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto triple conjunction, making a wide-orb hard aspect.
Jupiter-Pluto as an archetypal complex can be seen, in one light, as the interaction of the principles of expansion and power.
Constellated in a person, it can take the form of ambition, as a compelling or posessive impulse to do "something great," paired with a deep access to the resources of inner talent, wealth, influence.
Constellated in a society, it can take the form of aristocracy, plutocracy, the leadership class, the "elites."
Constellated in an evolutionary phenomenom, it can take the form of dominating an ecological niche, apex predation, successful fitting, etc.
With respect to the lens of evolutionary phenomena, there seems to be some kind of correlation or affinity of Jupiter-Pluto with the way the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading in the U.S. in real time.
Jupiter-Pluto, COVID-19 and the U.S.1
Below is a diagram from Our World In Data showing daily new confirmed cases of COVID-19, by country, using a 7-day rolling average for smoothing. There's about an order of magnitude difference going on with the U.S. relative to other developed countries that have been hit hard but have been able to flatten the curve.
Below is the daily new confirmed cases for the U.S. (without smoothing) in the top timeline, compared with the transits of the triple conjunction in the bottom timeline.
It looks like the rate of daily new cases is accelerating in tandem with the ingressing peaks of the Jupiter-Pluto alignment.
When Jupiter first entered into the conjunction, many countries were simultaneously facing an overwhelming influx of cases, with healthcare systems near or over capacity. Yet, many countries have been able to face the reality of the situation, successfully coordinate and adjust behavior, and flatten the curve.
What makes America different? One can say: a chronic and acute deficiency of an integrated Saturn in the culture.
The myth of the "American dream" is about access to opportunity, prosperity, and upward mobility. To "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which is embodied in the core values of freedom and individuality. It's about "moving up" to a "better life" and, taken to the nth degree, "being #1."
Here we can see the shadow of so-called American exceptionalism. Saturn offers the lens of sober assessment of the cold, hard facts, with the ability to observe an objective reality and accept the limitations and constraints that come along with that. Without this anchoring and grounding, without an honest relationship to ground truth, the most compelling perception, the most dazzling sensation, the most gripping narrative, rules the day. Only a reintegration of Saturn can cure the ails of a "post-truth" culture of rampant spectacle and sensationalism.
Furthermore, with such deeply ingrained values of personal freedom and individual rights, what is a health crisis that requires cautious coordination as a mode of caring about one another, becomes reframed into yet another hill on which to take a rebellious political stand.
Saturn is otherwise known as an ability to recognize one's responsibilities and duties, to willingly bear a burden, put in the work, engage in struggle and hardship -- toil for the harvest -- for the sake of a constructive outcome that will stand the test of time. In this case it is the simple burden of wearing a mask, the awkward duties of social distancing, and the ongoing responsibility of maintaining basic hygeine. For what? So people don't have to needlessly die.
This inability to relate with ground truth is exemplified by the president, who seems to be doing some kind of facsimile or impersonation job of a presidential officer, but without the vital core of leadership. A career reality tv personality who has been insulated from ground truth by many layers of artificially-produced narrative frames for years - which has the effect of optimizing priorities such that perception management and frame control become the master levers above all else. To be fair, a manipulation which is massively effective within staged portrayals of fiction and simulation, yet disastrous and catastrophic upon contact with external reality.
So you get delusional approaches such as calling the virus a "hoax" as a seemingly adequate defense, the method of denial in acknowledging unwanted incoming numbers of cases, the magical thinking of projecting the belief that "it's going to go away" without taking serious action, and the categorical error in judgment that slowing testing somehow slows the actual spread. All the while a real virus is increasingly spreading and taking up residence in people's lungs and blood, regardless of all the secondary narrative spin.
On Participation Mystique
(Participation mystique is a French term and basically translates to mystical participation.)
One of the centrally nuanced points with regards to the practice of archetypal astrology is the notion of participation or enaction. Or how the co-creative interaction of native with archetype is living and organic, fluid and flexible, with influence going both ways.
That our universe is open-ended and indeterminate, that the future is a possibility.
That it takes both archetypal patterning to first step down fields of infinite possibilities into fields of informed multivalence, and that it takes your participation as a native of the cosmos with inalienable birthrights to further collapse multivalent possibilities into specific manifestation.
The main takeaway here is to articulate the principle underlying why the U.S. has been an outlier when it comes to its participation in events occuring in correlation with the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto triple conjunction of 2020.
Herein lies an essential advantage of archetypal astrology in practice: knowing who the gods are and what the gods want at any given point in time affords us the skillful means with which to more consciously participate with the nature and evolution of the unfolding cosmos. For example, in America, all it takes is the conscious enaction of a few basic Saturnian principles of restraint, responsibility, sobriety, respect for one another, and we could have averted the massively inflated death toll.
Footnotes
- Thanks to Chris Brennan for his observation of the peaks of the Jupiter-Pluto transit coinciding with COVID-19 case spikes for the U.S. during his July Forecast.